NanoClaw Creator Loses SEO Battle To Impostor Website

The creator of NanoClaw, an open supply AI agent platform with over 18,000 GitHub stars, says Google is ranking a fake website above his project’s real site.

In assessments carried out on March 5, an impostor website ranked on the prime of Google for the venture’s personal identify. The true web site, nanoclaw.dev, didn’t seem within the first a number of pages of outcomes.

What’s Occurring

Gavriel Cohen, a software program engineer and former Wix developer, posted a thread on X describing the issue.

Cohen launched NanoClaw in early February as a security-focused various to OpenClaw, the viral open supply AI agent platform. The venture grew rapidly. VentureBeat covered it, The Register profiled Cohen, and AI researcher Andrej Karpathy publicly praised the venture’s structure.

Round February 8, somebody registered nanoclaw.internet and created an auto-generated website scraped from the venture’s GitHub README. Cohen mentioned he didn’t have an internet site on the time as a result of the GitHub repo was the venture.

Because the venture gained press protection, folks saved contacting him about issues with “his” web site. It wasn’t his.

He constructed the true website at nanoclaw.dev after which took a number of commonplace web optimization and remediation steps. He linked it from the GitHub repo. He added structured knowledge. He submitted to Google Search Console. He filed takedown notices with Google, Cloudflare, and the area registrar. Publications masking the venture linked to nanoclaw.dev.

As of March 5, the impostor website nonetheless ranked above the true one.

In his thread, Cohen wrote that the pretend website is “displaying factually mistaken details about the venture and falsifying its publication dates.” He known as the state of affairs “a reside, lively safety danger” as a result of the individual operating nanoclaw.internet might exchange the web page content material with malicious obtain hyperlinks or a phishing web page at any time.

The Hacker News thread about Cohen’s grievance reached 315 factors and over 150 feedback inside hours.

Similar Downside Throughout Search Engines

Hacker Information commenters examined the identical search on different engines and located the issue extends past Google.

One commenter reported that the pretend website ranked #1 on DuckDuckGo and #3 on Kagi, whereas the true website didn’t seem on DuckDuckGo in any respect. Another found that Bing, Courageous, Ecosia, and Qwant all confirmed the pretend website in prime positions. Mojeek was the one engine examined that ranked the true website and excluded the pretend one.

Why This Issues

Prior to now, Google’s John Mueller said that copied content material persistently rating above the unique could level to a website high quality drawback. Mueller recommended website homeowners reassess their total high quality if this retains taking place.

Cohen’s case assessments that logic. His venture has 18,000 GitHub stars, protection from CNBC, VentureBeat, and The Register, a Karpathy endorsement, and a weblog publish that hit #1 on Hacker Information. Each social profile and the GitHub repo itself level to nanoclaw.dev. On its face, lots of the seen alerts seem to favor the true website.

The truth that Hacker Information commenters reported related outcomes throughout a number of search engines like google and yahoo suggests one thing deeper than a Google-specific bug. One doable issue is timing, because the pretend website seems to have been listed earlier than the true website launched.

For anybody constructing a brand new product, the important thing takeaway right here is to rethink the fitting time to register a website. Cohen centered on delivery code earlier than constructing an internet site. That’s commonplace open supply follow, however search engines like google and yahoo listed the impostor first, and correcting that after the very fact proved tougher than any of the beneficial steps counsel it must be.

Wanting Forward

Cohen has not indicated whether or not Google responded to his takedown requests. One web optimization practitioner within the Hacker Information thread offered concrete advice, together with mapping the pretend website’s backlinks and contacting publications that unintentionally linked to the mistaken area.

The state of affairs stays unresolved. Google had not commented on the time of publishing.

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