Imo a logical interpretation of "shadow ban" would be when you are banned but they didn't tell you they banned you, and regular "ban" is when they tell you you were banned. It makes enough sense that people don't think they need to look it up to confirm.
edit: funny enough, I did double-check the wikipedia page to make sure my understanding was correct, but upon reading further it does acknowledge the expanding of the definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning
That doesn't sound as cool and victimey though.
Ghost Banned
or
Ghostdexed
The automated tool says it's in violation of some unnamed rule, but I can't figure out which. There's zero SEO, tracking, or ads, and the content is educational and G-rated.
All the other guides index just fine.
I asked for a review and they came back with the same ambiguous message. Eventually I just gave up.
Recently I split the C guide in two. I'll have to check to see if that made any difference.
But it left a bad taste, and now I don't trust Bing or DDG to provide complete results. Google's overrun with spam, but at least my stuff actually shows up on Startpage.
But I'm pretty sure mine is the greatest that you can't pay money for. ;)
But they index everything else on my site and don't prude out over that...
(Yes, not adding much insightful conversation. I don’t care if I get downvoted.)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=c+guide+stdalign&t=ffab&ia=web
brings up your guide as the 6th result.
I always wondered about this. What exactly is a backlink, and why should I need one?
Because if you put the headlines (in quotes) from two of his recent articles into Bring, e.g. either "Megan Smith explaining the General Magic prototyping process" or "Denialists, Alarmists, and Doomists", both point as their first result to a URL starting with "https://www.scien.cx" which seems to be the spam site with a copy of each article. (The URL isn't loading right now, however, when I try to visit.)
How to fix it really depends on what techniques they're using to mirror your site, of which there are many.
Example search and resulting URL:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22Megan+Smith+explaining+the+...
https://www.scien.cx/2022/12/25/megan-smith-explaining-the-g...
Compare with Google getting it right:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Megan+Smith+explaining+th...
https://daverupert.com/2022/12/megan-smith-general-magic-pro...
It feels like the Internet is a more hostile place than ever for small-time websites. You get squeezed from below by wily criminals, and crushed from above by careless megacorps who want to filter out anything that doesn't make them money.
The problem is that the two work hand-in-hand, thanks to the advertising driven search model, and the search engines owning the main advertising platforms.
It should be easy for search engines to identify an original site from the SEO spammer rip-offs - the original site is going to have no adverts (or certainly fewer) while the SEO spammer copies are going to be covered in adverts. The problem is that the search engines have no incentive to do so, in fact if anything they have the incentive to send people to the sites with more adverts.
And of course the whole problem has been created by the search engines in the first place - there would be no point in SEO spammers making advert-laden ripoff sites if it wasn't to rake in advertising revenue.
Have we gotten to the point where websites (and their content) need to be verified like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok do for personal accounts?
If so, will search engines be the ones verifying - using this as a new revenue scheme (with the dangers inherent in this... ie; pay to be listed or ranked higher)?
The more sophisticated and popular the copycat site is (scraping from a distributed network, stripping most HTML tags, etc.), the harder it becomes, and the only thing is to contact the search and hope they can manually mark your domain as the authoritative one. Your success may vary according to your popularity/importance.
https://daverupert.com/atom.xml
First, he sends it with a "content-type: application/xml" header. In contrast to most sites that send it with "content-type: application/atom+xml". Which seems to have the nice effect that it renders in Firefox instead of opening the usual "What should Firefox do with this file?" popup.
Secondly, he provides this nice header text "Yahaha, you found me! This is my RSS feed.". It seems to be fetched via this part of the code:
<?xml-stylesheet href="/pretty-feed-v3.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>
Pretty nice. Are those best practices? Or will "content-type: application/xml" mess with users who have a native feed reader installed and expect the reader to kick in when they click on a feed url?
"An elegant weapon for a more... civilized age."
One of the ideas people had back then was having a product catalog in XML that your tool would give you, and that you could upload to your website and display as a nice website via XSLT.
It was such a fascinating technology when I learned about it, but I’m not sure if it ever saw any serious use? Maybe in enterprise?
I'll say it again: It comes down to how you treat people. Treat others the way you want to be treated. No one wants to be shadowbanned and we can all agree it is a decidedly cowardly and cruel thing to do.
And you can't use "quality" or anything short of being coerced as an excuse. Techniques and technologies to moderate people without shadowmodding at scale are mot just there but very well established. A site for technologists has no excuse to shadowmod other than elitism amorality.
I have showdead turned on. I see fresh accounts that are automatically dead on each comment which are legit contributions, probably because they're using Tor or a widely abused VPN; that's the only common miscarriage of HN moderation I regularly see, and I vouch for house comments. Those accounts should be in the clear after a week or something like that. I have a couple comments I feel shouldn't be dead, but I can see how others would feel differently, and I have I believe 3 dead comments out of >3000 (many of which expressed views others vocally disagreed with, and I generally feel my views are not particularly popular on HN). But most of the dead comments I see are obviously harmful to discussion. The last time I saw hate speech from a banned HN account - was earlier today. What is it I'm missing here?
It's all well and good to say, treat others as you'd like to be treated. But I don't want to be harassed either. So I forgo harassing people sure. But what's to be done about the people harassing me?
Are you perhaps unaware of a phenomenon called the paradox of tolerance where, if you extend universal tolerance to everyone, including those who use their speech to silence others (through threats, harassment, shouting over people, poisoning the well, etc), you still end up with a forum in which not everyone can share their ideas?
Scrolling further, I don’t seem to find my own site either… https://donatstudios.com
I’ve added my site into Bing webmaster tools, we’ll see if it helps I guess.
[0] https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/url-submission-62f2860b
It says your IP doesn't direct to your site. I wonder if that's the problem.
I recently discovered that one of my services is on stage MS email naughty list, and found out it's because MS uses SpamCop.
I contacted SpamCop and it was very responsive. Unfortunately, the solution SpamCop suggested was to move the entire project to a different provider.
Perhaps some server-side filtering going on, blocking the bingbot user-agent?
It's probably not the reason, but it's worth noting that the author is using Amazon affiliate links in violation of Amazon and FTC rules because they're not disclosing the fact that they profit from purchases through their links.
Per Amazon:
>Anytime you share an affiliate link, it's important to disclose that to your audience... you must (1) include a legally compliant disclosure with your links and (2) identify yourself on your Site as an Amazon Associate with the language required by the Operating Agreement.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/GHQNZAU...
Per FTC:
>As for where to place a disclosure, the guiding principle is that it has to be clear and conspicuous... Consumers should be able to notice the disclosure easily. They shouldn’t have to hunt for it.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...
[EDIT] I just published a new blog post "Bing and DuckDuckGo removed my business web site AGAIN" https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/bing2.html
Sigh.
It’s been a few months since and my website is indeed back in the search results so I advice whoever is having this problem to reach out to Bing.
While it is more likely the poster will get a few people to check on the situation and naively drive up page rank... a personal site is just a rounding error for traffic in a long-tail distribution known as the modern web.
Most search engines will correlate user-side telemetry traffic against crawler and web stats. i.e. if the bots tend to prefer your site for abnormal reasons, the ranking algorithm may blacklist a signature, domain, and IP sets for several weeks as punishment.
Note too, it is still common for a human employee to manually check a suddenly popular site that pops up out of obscurity. i.e. this catches the more sophisticated cheats, and may have legal repercussions in severe cases.
In summary, if you mess with modern search engines, than expect the ban hammer to fall eventually. ;)
Why, Bing does not totally ignore bad links.
The good news, all sites I've seen affected by this recover after a few weeks.
Maybe change this? Simply add:
User-agent: * Disallow:
To allow all crawlers to the site.
After a bit of poking around, it would appear Bing may need an allow block to crawl. I don't know what DDG does, but the author's site effectively has nothing in the robots.txt file, other than a commented out Disallow block. From doing this before in the past, I suggest include the following:
User-agent: *
Allow: /The point of a shadow ban is for the banned user to not notice.
This sounds like a regular old ban/blocklist.
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