(Founder Stories) Stack Exchange?s Joel Spolsky On How SEO Makes The Internet Worse

Content farms and SEO are the bane of the Internet. Google is fighting it, but somehow spam results keep slipping through. In this second installment of our Founder Stories interview with Stack Exchange CEO Joel Spolsky, he talks about how SEO spam sites make the Internet worse. For instance, Stack Overflow is the premier site on the Internet for programmers to ask and answer questions about code. But Spolsky charges that SEO spam sites just rip the questions and answers straight off the site, wrap them with some black-hat SEO magic and Google ads, and rank higher than the original page on Stack Overflow. "They took our content, put Google ads on it, and made it worse because not in situ," says Spolsky. "They used SEO techniques to rank higher."

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