I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

senko

> This isn't an SEO problem. This is a Google problem. Sorry, but this is a SEO problem. The fake site has probably been linked to by a number of high-SEO outlets. What you should do is contact them and tell them to fix the links (to point to your site), which they should be happy to do.

barelysapient

The more things change the more they stay the same.

AznHisoka

I’m looking at this from a 3rd party of view (definitely not claiming the .net “deserves” to rank higher) 1) the .net version has a couple of very high authority links, namely from theregister and thenewstack (both of which have had lots of engagement). I highly doubt it would have ranked without those links. 2) its only been a week. Give Google time to understand which pages should rank higher. 3) Google is biased towards sites that cover a topic earlier than others. I’ve seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular competitive query years later, simply because they were one of the first to write about it. Suggestions: give it time. Meanwhile I would recommend linking to your website rather than your github everywhere you mention it, to give it a boost

azangru

> So I built a real website. That was two weeks ago. Is Google supposed to have drastic updates to its index over 2 weeks?

bubblewand

Yeah, Google stopped even trying to usefully index most of the web around ‘08 or ‘09 or so. Was super obvious when it happened and it’s been that way ever since. Your GitHub is up there because it’s a blessed website, your personal site isn’t and will struggle mightily to rank even when you search exact, unusual phrases on it, if it’s like most of the rest of the Web on Google these days. Get more traffic (make sure google analytics sees it, IDK but that probably matters because monopoly) and it might help. Most of the other indices aren’t much better. Turns out fighting spam is expensive, easier to just do a combo of boosting really big sites and blessed spammers that use your ad network.

ariehkovler

It's worse than that. There's a SECOND imitator that I actually stumbled on today while looking something up about nanoclaw - nanoclawS [dot] io - and that one's harvesting email addresses. The obvious risk here is a bait and switch, where one of these sites switches their link to the Github repo to point to a malicious imitator repo instead. One approach would be to go after the sites themselves, not their Google ranking. See if their hosts are willing to take them down. Is there anything you can assert copyright over to hang a DCMA request on? That's hard for an Open Source project, I guess. And the fake sites aren't (yet) doing any actual scamming. Good luck, though!

DeathArrow

>We trust Google to surface reliable information about elections. Vaccines. Medical conditions. Financial decisions. And they can't get this right? Actually I don't trust Google and I don't expect it to surface reliable information. I expect it to surface information and I will dig through it and judge for myself whether it is reliable or not.

dirk94018

We had a similar experience — looks like someone used AI to clone our site's design and structure at linuxtoaster.com. The real issue Gavriel is highlighting goes beyond SEO. The cost of creating a convincing copycat site just went to zero. Anyone can feed a successful page to an LLM and get a polished clone in minutes. And for open source projects it's even worse — they can clone your website AND clone your code, have an AI rebrand it, and ship a convincing-looking alternative overnight.

markus_zhang

My advice to all OSS developers: if you open source your project, expect it to be abused in all possible ways. Don't open source if you have anxiety over it. It is how the world works, whether we like it or not. I appreciate that you open source your projects for us to study. But TBH, please help yourself first.

roywiggins

I'll be honest, I'd take this more seriously if this post didn't read like ChatGPT output. If you won't spend the effort to use your own words why should I stir myself to care? Sorry, I'll put it in hand-crafted ChatGPTese: ## The Slop Problem Every post sounds the same. No intelligence. No individuality. Just pure, clean LLM slop. Let's dive in. - Every post has LLM tells . This is key. - Posts get upvoted anyway . Nobody seems to notice or indeed care. - People acclimate to the slop . This isn't just a coincidence. This is a real shift in standards. When people read enough of this, they begin to think it sounds normal. ## The Replying Dilemma Should you engage with the content, when there is a real person involved? On the one hand, they put their name on it, and probably the details are drawn from their prompt, so it can be said to fairly represent what they wanted to say. So maybe ragging on their ChatGPT prose is being mean. On the other hand, if nobody ever mentions this, the acclimatization will only get worse as the rising tide of slop overwhelms any other style of writing. ## The "Snobbery is good actually" Option Relentlessly bully people for their half-baked LLM copy. Make it your whole personality. Go insane. ## The "Giving Up" Solution Learn to stop worrying and love the LLM.

samuelknight

Copycats are not a new problem. You can be completely open source and have a trademark on the project name.

keiferski

Suddenly the pre-Google Yahoo model of curated links is starting to seem relevant again. Curation in general is probably a skill that will become more and more in demand as the Internet fills up with AI slop.

bob1029

Losing the SEO battle is a lot like losing money on the stock market. The system you are fighting is incredibly efficient and will never in a trillion years give a single shit about your specific concerns. You can hire lawyers and spend time complaining about it all day on social media. But you'll rarely get a drop of blood out of this stone. The best you can do is to step back, reevaluate your understanding of the market, and adjust your strategy.

Imustaskforhelp

Duckduckgo actually shows nanoclaw.net as the first result and the github page as second. Another point but DDG's AI feature actually references Nanoclaw.net as a source. Damn I booted up Orion (Kagi) and even Kagi shows nanoclaw.net as the third result after the github page with qwibitai and another github page with your (previous?) github username ie gavrielc which when clicked on also results to the same github page. There is an interesting find page in kagi which references the website but it still shows nanoclaw.net page earlier and the nanoclaw.dev interesting find shows the .dev domain barely that in first time I didn't even notice it. I expected it better from DDG/Kagi to be honest. I also tried brave and it had the same issue. Brave even is its own independent index and even that struggles with. Let's hope that this can quickly get patched though. Also a good reminder to people to prefer opening up github links than websites as I must admit that even as a tech-savvy person I could've fallen for nanoclaw.net link as well given its second in like all search engines.

gjsman-1000

Steve Jobs famously never allowed free meals at Apple. Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to things that are free; across the board - not donating to open-source, maxing out every dollar of food stamps, refusing to pay a dollar for an app if it has a free tier, even companies like AWS ripping off open source without any qualms. If you got an offer for a free relationship no strings attached, would you take it seriously? If someone on a street corner has artwork for $5 or $500, it could be the same piece of art, but which one gets more attention on first glance? If you want your work to be respected, do not make it open source. Your odds are slightly better at succeeding at acting. Remember that 97% of public GitHub repos have zero external users.

lucasluitjes

I've been annoyed with Google search quality lately and was wondering how the others fared on this specific issue. Turns out, mostly not much better. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Brave all had the github repo and nanoclaw.net (the fake homepage) in the first or second place. Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results, not the github repo or either the fake or real homepage. Mojeek was the exception, sort of. It had some random news sites up top, but the github repo in 2nd place and nanoclaw.dev (the real homepage) in the 4th place. The fake nanoclaw.net did not show. Kagi is the only one I couldn't try because apparently I used up my free credits a year back. Can anyone see how they compare?

bakugo

> I don't want to be playing this game. I want to be writing code I assume the "I" here refers to Claude, who seemingly wrote the entire project AND the linked post.

elevation

This project was launched very quickly, and may have not had a large budget for extra domains. But for entities with a bit more time, you can prevent this scenario by taking acquiring the .com/.net variant domains before launching.

Growtika

A couple years back John Reilly posted on HN "How I ruined my SEO" and I helped him fix it for free. He wrote about the whole thing here: https://johnnyreilly.com/how-we-fixed-my-seo Happy to do the same for you if you want. The quickest win in your case: map all the backlinks the .net site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every publication that linked to it. "Hey, you covered NanoClaw but linked to a fake site, here's the real one." You'd be surprised how many will actually swap the link. That alone could flip things. Beyond that there's some technical SEO stuff on nanoclaw.dev that would help - structured data, schema, signals for search engines and LLMs. Happy to walk you through it. update: ok this is getting more traction than I expected so let me give some practical stuff. 1. Google Search Console - did you add and verify nanoclaw.dev there? If not, do it now and submit your sitemap. Basic but critical. 2. I checked the fake site and it actually doesn't have that many backlinks, so the situation is more winnable than it looks. 3. Your GitHub repo has tons of high quality backlinks which is great. Outreach to those places, tell the story. I'm sure a few will add a link to your actual site. That alone makes you way more resilient to fakers going forward. This is only happening because everything is so new. Here's a list with all the backlinks pointing to your repo: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bBrYsppQuVrktL1lPfNm... 4. Open social profiles for the project - Twitter/X, LinkedIn page if you want. This helps search engines build a knowledge graph around NanoClaw. Then add Organization and sameAs schema markup to nanoclaw.dev connecting all the dots (your site, the GitHub repo, the social profiles). This is how you tell Google "these all belong to the same entity." 5. One more thing - you had a chance to link to nanoclaw.dev from this HN thread but you linked to your tweet instead. Totally get it, but a strong link from a front page HN post with all this traffic and engagement would do real work for your site's authority. If it's not crossing any rule (specific use case here so maybe check with the mods haha) drop a comment here with a link to nanoclaw.dev. I don't think anyone here would mind if it will get you few steps closer towards winning that fake site