Whenever i am trying to google a code issue i have, there is countless low quality sites just showing SO threads with no added value whatsoever.
It is so annoying it actually drives me mad.
Does anyone know what's up with that?
I am really disappointed because the guys creating these sites (i guess for some kind of monetization) must have some relation to coding. But i feel this is an attack against all of us. Every programmer should be grateful for the opportunity to find good quality content quickly. Now my search results are flooded with copy & paste from SO.
They are killing that.
Am I the only one experiencing this or being that annoyed by it?
P.S: I don't name URLs because if you don't know what I am talking about already, you probably don't have that issue.
- The search results for programming content has been very volatile the last year or so. Google has released a lot of core algorithm updates in the last year, which has caused a lot of high-quality sites to either lose traffic or stagnate.
- These low-quality code snippet sites have always been around, but their traffic has exploded this year after the algorithm changes. Just look at traffic estimates for one of the worst offenders - they get an estimated 18M views each month now, which has grown almost 10x in 12 months. Compare that to SO, which has stayed flat or even dropped in the same time-frame
- The new algorithm updates seem to actually hurt a lot of high-quality sites as it seemingly favors code snippets, exact-match phrases, and lots of internal linking. Great sites with well-written long-form content, like RealPython.com, don't get as much attention as they deserve, IMO. We try to publish useful content, but consistently have our traffic slashed by Google's updates, which end up favoring copy-pasted code from SO, GitHub, and even our own articles.
- The programming content "industry" is highly fragmented (outside of SO) and difficult to monetize, which is why so many sites are covered in ads. Because of this, it's a land grab for traffic and increasing RPMs with more ads, hence these low-quality snippet sites. Admittedly, we monetize with ads but are actively trying to move away from it with paid content. It's a difficult task as it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything, so the barrier to entry is high unless you monetize with ads.
- I'll admit that this is likely a difficult problem because of how programmer's use Google. My guess is that because we often search for obscure errors/problems/code, their algorithm favors exact-match phrases to better find the solution. They might then give higher priority to pages that seem like they're dedicated to whatever you searched for (i.e. the low-quality snippet sites) over a GitHub repo that contains that snippet _and_ a bunch of other unrelated code.
Just my two cents. Interested to hear your thoughts :)