@gamingonlinux I really want to vomit reading this

@gamingonlinux That's absolutely disgusting.

@gamingonlinux ah well like most of spam I get, my thoughts are “wow congrats. But I don’t care about competitors stealing stuff”

@gamingonlinux I rly wish google would start rating on quality metrics a lot more.

@gamingonlinux to be fair, he‘s getting hated in his replies which I love to see.

@gamingonlinux imagine being proud of this level of twattery. What a bellend.

@gamingonlinux

SEO is the industrialisation of a race to the bottom in an information economy, performed by nerds who only are valued in an information economy.

@gamingonlinux I think there will come a time where SEO farms pollute the web so much that search engines will just stop being a reliable way of finding stuff in the internet

@gamingonlinux@mastodon.social Wow, and they proudly use the verb "steal" to describe what they did 🤷
That's like boasting about stealing someone's bag at a bus.

@gamingonlinux It's a good thing we keep pouring billions into AI to make more shit like this!

@gamingonlinux some men just want to watch the world burn.

@gamingonlinux he's so proud to make the Web a worse place.

@gamingonlinux well, at least now we really know why search results are a pile of shit

@gamingonlinux

The thing is... is there even any profit or gain in this?
Are the people visiting shitty AI generated articles actually buying anything or clicking on Ads or whatever?
If not, what's the point?
Or is it just yet another grift where he can use this as evidence to sell some kind of course or service where he helps others to do the same?

@gamingonlinux This is why the small web is the future, and these SEO/AI people should be defederated here (in the Fediverse) on sight.

@gamingonlinux Seems like a confession to commercial fraud.

@gamingonlinux The internet was a fucking mistake

@gamingonlinux He seems so happy about making writing on the internet completely pointless.

Perhaps there is something in that ‘dead internet theory’ now…

It is grim.

@gamingonlinux And he sounds so proud!

@gamingonlinux
...is anyone else annoyed that he's using the word "traffic" like it's a unit of measure?

@gamingonlinux This stuff is cancer.
Searched for "Game XYZ crashes with error ZYX" - First page on Google is now filled with Ai Crap saying: "Update your driver and make sure your pc fulfills the minimal system requirements"

What the fuck...

We don't need websites which only exist to lure people with worthless Ai crap into them to show ads.

@gamingonlinux I’m sure this useless bastard refers to himself as a ‘disruptor’.

@gamingonlinux >We got 489,509 traffic in October alone

If I inject 3 traffic today, is this how it ends?

@gamingonlinux and this is why I support brick and mortar libraries.

@gamingonlinux

It worries me that some people believe it's ok to brag about these shitty behaviours & attitudes in the open (It most certainly means that they have a wide audience who also believe the same; which is even worse than the publicised fact in itself).

@gamingonlinux Thats 489509 people who now think that company is trash for wasting their time with AI generated chaff pages, the company will die like kelkoo¦bizrate¦pixmania¦dealtime¦pricerunner¦dooyoo¦pricegrabber¦pricewatch¦
resellerratings¦shopbot¦comparestoreprices¦ciao¦unbeatable¦shopping¦epinions¦nextag and may others who tried that before them

@gamingonlinux at no point did they ask themselves “does this benefit anyone, really”

@gamingonlinux What a frigging leech.

@gamingonlinux this kinda fails to consider that those "ai articles" are useless because they have no actual information and likely will make your company look bad

@gamingonlinux
I love that he is bragging about this like it's something to be proud of. What a bellend, actively contributing to the already poor state of search engine results

@gamingonlinux yacy.net build Your own SEO resistant search engine ;)

@gamingonlinux it really has made the search experience bleak.

@gamingonlinux@mastodon.social Imagine posting something like this and being proud of it. What an absolute tool.

Ought to be illegal, imo. In fact, it sounds like it's bordering on copyright infringement as it is.

if this is internet of today, imagine what it will be tomorrow.

@gamingonlinux Why is he still proud of ruining the internet???

@gamingonlinux to openly brag about it like that too? Disgusting.

@gamingonlinux
SEO was a crime to begin with. This is SEO with weaponized AI.

@gamingonlinux Hence the need for hand-crafted, manually curated lists of websites and content! This is what Yahoo was back in the day. This is basically what a blogroll is. Takes some conscious effort but it's something anyone can do.

@gamingonlinux SEO is the biggest pile of poo that ever came to exist,

@gamingonlinux

Complaining is pointless because this guy is not the problem.

Realise this is capitalism, the problem is the system we allow to exist, and that's it.

Either we recognise that and change the system or we have to suck it up.

Yes he's unethical, because capitalism is unethical, as defined by legislation and those who lobby and craft it with our consent or acquiescence.

This guy is not the problem, we are.

@gamingonlinux I hope his AI isn't hallucinating promises he can't keep.

@gamingonlinux @kornel Curious to think what the visitor they “gained” this way ended up doing.
I think the brand damage they've done to their site is massive.

@gamingonlinux
Getting this under control by legal means will be a challenge in it´s own right.

@gamingonlinux This is part of why I switched to Kagi Search instead of Google. They actively work to downrank these garbage websites because they are garbage, and you can block their domain(s) from your search results if you still see them. Very much worth the sub

@gamingonlinux stealing traffic from a real competitor isn't something to brag about.

@gamingonlinux @drewdevault : before any outcry, ask some basic questions:

1. Is this traffic number real? Or mostly populated by bots? (like most web traffic).

2. How could he even know that the traffic has been "stolen from a competitor" or been caused by SEO?

3. Besides costing more on the AWS bill, has that traffic improved anything for the business? Are there really more customers?

Remember: this kind of business is "feelgood-lies-as-a-service" for ill-advised CEO.

Nothing to see…

@gamingonlinux I want to Greenscreen Plane Falling & Car Crash Gif them.

@gamingonlinux Thanks for helping me add someone on Twitter to my block list

@gamingonlinux

@gamingonlinux it isn't the flex you think it is, Jake! 🤣😵‍💫

@gamingonlinux this falls under the #fgoogle hashtag

@gamingonlinux Why do SEO and AI exist ?

@gamingonlinux raaaaage.

Thanks for shitting up search, asshole. Like it wasn't bad enough BEFORE this.

@gamingonlinux I wonder if there could be some sort of copyright infringement case with the copying AND the-type of use for the URLs? I believe copying URLs is ok, but the way they were used here is different in that they are not linking back to the original articles. @mgeist

@gamingonlinux People like this look at the Internet and AI with the same eyes an oil executive looks at a nature preserve... an unexploited resource, and they don't give a shit how much chaos they cause in exploiting it.

@gamingonlinux What an absolute asshat! And he’s proud of it too. Un-fucking-believable!

@gamingonlinux Several million people wasting tens of seconds each should qualify for some degree of homicide. :P

@gamingonlinux i mean, arguably it’s google’s dominance that is ruining the internet by making this kind of game possible at all.

@gamingonlinux Right, let me get this straight. He makes sure his AI written articles (i.e pure shit that's useful to no one) show up above a competitor on google. The ONLY money he's making on this is from the malware ads on his site, destroying any reputation his business ever had in the process, and he's bragging about it like he invented the wheel? Average shitter user IQ on this one, clearly 😂

@gamingonlinux I don't understand any of this but I know my brother does. He is going to love (hate) this

@gamingonlinux yeah I read that and thought “I hope your head falls off at an inconvenient moment”

@gamingonlinux Design every system with game theory in mind. Assume malicious people will do their best to exploit it if it can profit them.

@gamingonlinux

The system of algorithms that they exploit is the problem. If you put food out, animals will come eat it.

@gamingonlinux

Google Search used to fight SEO. They stopped, probably like 2-3 years ago, to concentrate on showing you more ads.

@gamingonlinux Not mentioned: 3 conversions

@gamingonlinux What is even the point of this, though? Like, _how_ did "stealing" all this traffic turn into revenue, if it in fact was good for anything but bragging rights?

@gamingonlinux @leben And they are proud of this shit??!

@gamingonlinux I mean now we know how to do it, https://www.contentgrowth.com/ might take a hit in the rankings...

@gamingonlinux The Internet is perfectly capable of determining this shit is damage and routing around it. We're just not doing it. Yet....

@gamingonlinux for clarity: Jake Ward's budiness is SEO optimization. He (likely) did this for a client and is showing off to get more clients.

@gamingonlinux what a psychopath

@gamingonlinux this you?

(friends don't let friends share alt-textless screenshots.
actual source for previous toot:
https://nitter.net/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509#m
http://web.archive.org/web/20231127124816/https://nitter.net/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509#m)

@gamingonlinux @campuscodi one of the downsides of social media is that you can say things without consequence that if you said them in person, you'd get an incredulous "what the fuck is wrong with you?!?" at the least, and more likely a very deserved smack in the mouth.

@gamingonlinux That is truly unethical. I would never get a product from that company or even use their service. He even has the audacity to brag about it online. I hope he and his company gets sued big time for what he has done.

@gamingonlinux I looked up that guy's name and ended up with a lot of Twilight's Jacob & Edward ship fanfic. At least that's some real content.

@gamingonlinux I saw a (somewhat) less egregious email newsletter a few weeks ago where a dev bragged about using identifying a spreadsheet full of keywords for his content and then feeding those keywords into ChatGPT to generate SEO-optimized headlines and then making another pass to generate the post content. Which seemed less predatory at first glance, but then it's still just automating content farming and providing nothing new to society.

@gamingonlinux a huge reason the Internet just isn't that fun anymore

@gamingonlinux @PragmaticAndy that explains why it had been impossible to find anything on Google for the last 9 months. I am teaching class and looking for illustrations I used last year, but all I am finding are coding bootcamp advertisements.

@gamingonlinux

Can we re-brand them as "misdirection agents"?

The whole point of "search engine optimization" is to con someone to click on their link instead of the one that contains what the searcher was trying to look for.

@gamingonlinux Putting "SEO" on your resume under skills is sort of like listing "Con Artist" under job experience.

@gamingonlinux Search engines need to just delist all SEO'd sites, 24 hours the first time, a week thereafter. It's spam. Kill it.

@gamingonlinux this only worked because of 2 things:

1) their site/client's site was significantly more authoritative than this competitor. (Either that or the competitor's content was woeful, the only ways new pages could beat old pages so quickly)

2) google isn't yet good enough at penalising AI spam. Mostly because it is only an AI itself, so it has exactly the same shortfalls

Wait a year or two, AI spam content will disappear and the companies who did it at scale will also disappear.

@gamingonlinux Jake is a snake

@gamingonlinux This is garbage, but probably not because it actually worked. If this really worked they would not brag about it and let everyone else know what to do. The guy is likely just trying to get clout through hate-reposting.

@gamingonlinux some others like AI character chat site https://netwrck.com and art generators like midjourney https://Ebank.nz are kind of art heists lol

@gamingonlinux I am mostly baffed by the unit of "traffic"

What is one traffic? A car, a road, a locomotive?

(Also I can assume it means clicks, but just... use clicks???)

@gamingonlinux @Barredo Does he say what “AI” tools they used to do this? ChatGPT isn’t 18 months old, so I’d love to know what he’s talking about. I don’t want to do it, but I’m 50% curious and 50% pretty sure he’s lying about something in this timeline.

@gamingonlinux yeah

@gamingonlinux this guy is doing us a service. proving how broken SEO is, and how useless google as a service is!

@gamingonlinux encountering stuff like this all the time, and before GPT it was just random pages filled with keywords or sites that scrape sources and just repost their content. I'm surprised search engines don't have tools to block results from specific domains on all future searches (or I haven't found said tools).

@gamingonlinux And this is why I don’t set foot in Silicon Valley anymore, my destroyed homeland.

@gamingonlinux yep, but they are clearly bragging about it because the guy's company is selling scam-as-a-service.

Sadly it's only a matter of time before clients start asking us web developers why we are not building them sites that generate thousands of garbage posts per hour, because that's what it takes to make the front page of Google.

@gamingonlinux 🍿

@gamingonlinux "we made a huge pile of shit, then pushed people (our potential clients) into it (so they waste their time being covered in shit). We're very proud. Also trendy word." I miss the old internet sometimes