Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

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2022-05-16 10:30:06

searchmysite.net was launched nearly 2 years ago to help people discover all the great original content on personal and independent websites which is so hard to find now that the major search engines have become swamped by SEO spam. It employed a number of novel techniques to try to avoid the same fate, such as having a community-driven curation and moderation layer, heavily downranking pages containing adverts to reduce the incentive for SEO spam, and aiming to pay the running costs from its search as a service rather than by selling user data to advertisers.

That makes it especially tragic to report that nearly all the traffic to the site is now from SEO spam bots, presumably searching for all that elusive SEO spam-free content. Here’s the stats for recent requests to the search page1:

I’ve always had some activity from bots2, but it has been manageable. However, in mid-April 2022, bot activity started to increase dramatically.

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