

Are Web Development Search Results Being Manipulated? - limedaring
http://www.impressivewebs.com/web-development-search-results-manipulated/

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franze
oh yes, subdomains gone wild have to do with SEO, but not in the way outlined
by the author.

duplicate (sub)domains resulting in duplicate sites with duplicate pages
mostly have a negative impact on the performance of a webproperty in the
SERPs.

why?

a link to www1.example.com does not automatically count as a vote for
www.example.com, a link to www.example.com does not count as a vote for
www1.example.com, that means they now how two websites both with one vote,
instead of one websites with two votes.

additionally, you have two websites which are in competition to each other,
and each of these websites has duplicated webpages which are in competition to
each other. both websites and webpages usually perform poorer - if google has
a doubt which of these duplicated pages on these duplicate sites is the best
page to point the user to (said that, google is pretty good in stripping doubt
out of the equation for subdomain duplicate pages issues)

if you have a webproperty with a "subdomains gone wild" issue, it is best
practice to canonical (either via the canonical tag or via HTTP 301 redirect)
them to one (sub)domain. it almost ever (depending on how big the issues was)
results in a better performance of the canonicalized webproperty - it
definitely helps the site on the (organic) linkbuilding front.

there are thousand reason why a webproperty can have a subdomain gone wild
issue (it was (once upon a time) even a common black hat practice of spamming
google with subdomain gone wild duplicate web-properties of the competition
sites if possible (and it's possible with sites with a wildcard subdomain
setting (i.e. _wildcard_.w3schools.com))

but in most cases "subdomains gone wild" does not have a positive impact on
the SERPs. (blocking results is not one of this cases.)

but yeah, what the real issues with w3school? why does this sh/t rank so well?

well first of all it should be said: "you are not statistically significant"
just because you (in this case we, the HN readers) are not happy with w3school
does not mean the average searcher (searching for HTML web dev stuff) is not
happy with it. they are happy (hey, they don't know better) and they use it
like crazy. they are happy with what they find. as google is measuring SEPR
"long click" very effectively they know exactly how well the average search
users uses a page/site. if all users would click back immediately, would not
stay long on the page, w3school would not be so dominant as it currently is.

secondly: links - i just did some backlinks check ons some obscure w3school
URLs, they all have links. now you might say: oh they buy links... does not
look like it, they have links from old forums, new forums, blogs, .edu
domains, ...

and: where is the competition? mdn does a great job, but it is a resource for
developers, for people who know what they are doing. w3school is a great
resource for people who do not know what they are doing or what they are
looking for - and w3school has a special page for every single thing / tag
that we don't even bother to mention anymore (it's outdated, it's old, some
say ugly, but it's there and has a unique description text, a unique example
on the page) - that means they have a page for most of the people using the
internet interested in HTML, people which think of HTML as a "programming
language" - for them w3school is the perfect product, no competition in sight.

what's the solution:

in the xoogler book "I'm feeling lucky" the author describes a case where a
wrong product keeps ocurring again and again for popular product searches.
they tuned the algorithm again and again, the results got better and better,
but the product showed up again and again. the engineers didn't know what to
do. one day, it was gone. what happened: one engineer just bought the product.
it wasn't listed in the store anymore. the issues was fixed.

fazit: somebody who cares about the internet (w3, mozilla, google, adobe,
microsoft, opera, ..) and profits form good, well structured HTML and working
javascript should just buy it (can't be that expensive).

~~~
redthrowaway
Nested parentheses: necessary in lisp; kind of a bitch when trying to read a
comment.

------
Kiro
It's nothing black hat going on here. W3schools is just using wildcard
subdomains and whenever people are accidentally linking to wwww.w3schools the
Google bot picks it up.

I love W3schools btw. Got me into coding and I still use it for reference.
Hate me all you want but I'm tired of people bashing them for no reason.

~~~
Lazare
W3schools is a cancer. They have old, outdated information. Their website,
their content, and their business model is all a throwback to last decade.
They sit atop of the search results, doing _nothing_ , and raking in cash
while providing a poor service. Meanwhile, their very dominance sucks all the
oxygen (page views, ad dollars) away, ensuring that better competitors can't
grow.

What redeeming feature do they have? If you aren't easy to use, accurate,
comprehensive, or responsive...how good a reference site are you?

I've yet to see anyone bash W3schools for no reason, but I see plenty of
people defending them for no reason.

~~~
jojopotato
Is there another alternative out there? I feel like the mozilla developer docs
are the only thing that comes to mind offhand.

~~~
Apocryphon
Tizag, which is second in the results, is a pretty good resource.

~~~
fuzzix
"Tizag, which is second in the results, is a pretty good resource."

Their Perl tutorial set is pretty terrible. They call it "PERL" (it's Perl),
they believe the latest stable version is 5.10 (it's 5.14) and the code
samples are simply awful.

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softbuilder
>They have as much power in web dev search results as Wikipedia has in regular
search results. That is just wrong.

Except they've been providing useful info for longer than Wikipedia has been
around. Sounds kind of right to me. They may not be as current as they used to
be, but for the 12 years that I've used them they have helped fill in my
knowledge cracks and I've appreciated it.

I don't understand the hate. If you really want someone to hate, hate the W3C
for making their info so cryptic or non-existent for years that places like
W3Schools had a market.

~~~
phillmv
Mostly that the Mozilla docs are far superior, and it hurts all of us if newbs
continue to hit up really confusing documentation.

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trengof
May I suggest we all block w3schools.com at: <http://www.google.com/reviews/t>

Google states that it "may use everyone's blocking information to improve the
ranking of search results overall" so this may be the best way to take action.

------
jameswyse
I'm also sick of seeing their site on the first page of google, most of the
time their content is completely out of date.

You can permanently block them from search results on Google by visiting:
<http://www.google.com/reviews/t> and entering <http://w3schools.com>

~~~
jacobr
I have had both <http://w3schools.com> and <http://www.w3schools.com> in my
block list for months, but w3schools still show up in my search results, and
with www and not wwww or www1 or something like that. :-(

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ntkachov
This is honestly why I use duckduckgo on any of my dev computers. They don't
always have best results, but for stuff like java(script) not only do they
have the !js/!java syntax for going straight to the docs but they also don't
have over-seo'd websites cluttering up their results.

Edit: Also On DDG the same search would have been !js replace and you would
have seen this page : <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=replace>

~~~
jameswyse
I like DDG, but I'm finding it hard to break the Google habit.

I did just check out their settings area and it offers a lot of customisation
which I love. I might just give it another (duck duck) go!

~~~
mrspeaker
The trick is to always use DDG, but just add !g to search google when you're
not satisfied (or !gi to search google images). You start to use google less
and less after you get used to the DDG layout: At first it seems (for some
reason) like you're getting less useful results on DDG - but after a while you
can see you're getting pretty much the same results, in a different format!

------
lucb1e
I don't have as many problems with W3Schools as the author of this and many
comments below here. What you say is true, but _their target audience is
mainly newbies, not professionals who know what they are doing._ They might
provide some outdated information, some things may even be false. But do they
deserve to be called a cancer? (Read it below in the other comments, and that
wasn't the first time I read it.) After all, doesn't every website with lots
of information make mistakes?

Also in the case of the author, who was looking for about the second most
basic Javascript method there is, the result seemed appropriate. He didn't
even have to click the page, the info was right there in front of him.

Don't get me wrong though, I do agree that their different subdomains are a
wrong thing to do, and I fully agree if Google decides to punish them by
blocking/lowering results for *.w3schools.com for a couple months. I also
agree that the Mozilla Developer Network may be a much better resource, both
for newbies and professionals. But if you are that much against W3Schools, why
don't you use the search function of MDN instead of Google's general search?

~~~
Pwnguinz
As you say, they contain outdated and _out right false_ information.

Now, it's not merely being wrong once in a blue moon or one or two articles
being a bit behind the curve, but the sheer egregiousness of its mistakes plus
the lack of action despite being shown to be incorrect (see: w3fools.com)
which in the eyes of many qualifies it to be called a "cancer"; certainly in
the realm of web development resources, that label seems rather valid.

------
fendmark
Having all of these mirrors of their domain indexed certainly isn't helping
W3schools from an SEO perspective.

It is highly unlikely that this was done intentionally, just wildcard
subdomains set as many have already said.

Read the last few comments on the actual post for good laugh.

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ChrisLTD
Having two or three domains with the same content should be OK. After all,
many sites have a www and simply a top level domain with the same content. But
having more than that should be penalized by the search engine gnomes.

~~~
icebraining
Why not use a 301 instead of having duplicated content?

~~~
ChrisLTD
That's what I do, but I'm just saying a lot of sites duplicate the content
without intending to do anything nefarious.

------
redthrowaway
Paging Dr. Cutts....

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AznHisoka
I think Google classifies sites in different buckets. There's the "trusted"
sites - the brand names that will only get penalized by their algorithms if
they do something very very wrong, and another bucket, where you get less
leeway. W3Schools is in the first.

Of course, big brands do get penalized like JCPenny and Forbes, but this often
happens when they're called out by the media. Google for the most part, since
Panda have said they want to rely more on algorithms rather than on handjobs

~~~
tripzilch
which leaves us the questions:

1) why is w3school in that list?

2) if they got it because lots of (outdated) sites are linking to them, why do
their alternate subdomains get a similar bonus?

3) this whole privileged "authority" bucket crap stinks. it used to be that a
really good sub-page on somebody's geocities site could be the no.1 go-to
first result for a certain search topic. why? because loads of people that
knew it was good would link to it because it was just that good of a
comprehensive resource. hearing more and more about this new ranking method
makes me wonder whether it's even _possible_ for a small guy to come up top in
the results like that. And it's not so much that I feel for this small guy,
but rather that I _know_ I'm missing out on a lot of _honest_ good web content
that Google simply isn't showing me.

~~~
BrandonM
> this new ranking method makes me wonder whether it's even _possible_ for a
> small guy to come up top in the results like that

If you search for "Remote Unix" on Google (at least for me), a post on my
humble blog is the second result. This isn't exactly the narrowest search
term, and I'm certainly no juggernaut of a site, so I take that to mean that
small random-ass pages can still rank well for a query.

------
manojlds
Aren't all search results manipulated if you think about it - that is what the
SEO "experts" do. And I think the right word is "gamed".

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brudgers
w3schools.com runs google.api's and hosts ads using Google services.

This very day, I have it on good authority that their ability to game Google's
search algorithm is entirely coincidental.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3740869>

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kevinburke
This is a clear violation of the webmaster guidelines - the subdomains should
get swatted by google soon.

~~~
vibrunazo
How do we report that to google? Interestingly, I googled that, but couldn't
find it :S

~~~
bigiain
The same way you report anything to Google - you whine on your own blog or
kick up a stink on social media, and hope a Google employee who cares notices…

(Or, I suspect having a $100k+/month Adwords buy probably gives you a magical
number to call.)

~~~
kevinburke
Actually Google works pretty hard to keep the Adwords and web spam teams
separated; they are discouraged from talking to each other at all.

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pferdefleisch
Or maybe they are just trying to parallelize downloads.
[http://code.google.com/speed/page-
speed/docs/rtt.html#Parall...](http://code.google.com/speed/page-
speed/docs/rtt.html#ParallelizeDownloads)

------
electrichead
This certainly would explain a lot. I don't even see the option to block that
site, though I have blocked a few others before. It doesn't seem to do
anything at all. Bigresource.com is my nemesis.

~~~
esrauch
I believe you can only block a site if you click a link and hit back within a
certain amount of time.

~~~
ruethewhirled
Plus you need to be logged into google account

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nmridul
Now, this is going to bring them even more back links to make sure that they
remain at the top once again.

