Happy to do the same for you if you want.
The quickest win in your case: map all the backlinks the .net site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every publication that linked to it. "Hey, you covered NanoClaw but linked to a fake site, here's the real one." You'd be surprised how many will actually swap the link. That alone could flip things.
Beyond that there's some technical SEO stuff on nanoclaw.dev that would help - structured data, schema, signals for search engines and LLMs. Happy to walk you through it.
update: ok this is getting more traction than I expected so let me give some practical stuff.
1. Google Search Console - did you add and verify nanoclaw.dev there? If not, do it now and submit your sitemap. Basic but critical.
2. I checked the fake site and it actually doesn't have that many backlinks, so the situation is more winnable than it looks.
3. Your GitHub repo has tons of high quality backlinks which is great. Outreach to those places, tell the story. I'm sure a few will add a link to your actual site. That alone makes you way more resilient to fakers going forward. This is only happening because everything is so new. Here's a list with all the backlinks pointing to your repo:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bBrYsppQuVrktL1lPfNm...
4. Open social profiles for the project - Twitter/X, LinkedIn page if you want. This helps search engines build a knowledge graph around NanoClaw. Then add Organization and sameAs schema markup to nanoclaw.dev connecting all the dots (your site, the GitHub repo, the social profiles). This is how you tell Google "these all belong to the same entity."
5. One more thing - you had a chance to link to nanoclaw.dev from this HN thread but you linked to your tweet instead. Totally get it, but a strong link from a front page HN post with all this traffic and engagement would do real work for your site's authority. If it's not crossing any rule (specific use case here so maybe check with the mods haha) drop a comment here with a link to nanoclaw.dev. I don't think anyone here would mind if it will get you few steps closer towards winning that fake site
1) the .net version has a couple of very high authority links, namely from theregister and thenewstack (both of which have had lots of engagement).
I highly doubt it would have ranked without those links.
2) its only been a week. Give Google time to understand which pages should rank higher.
3) Google is biased towards sites that cover a topic earlier than others.
I’ve seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular competitive query years later, simply because they were one of the first to write about it.
Suggestions: give it time. Meanwhile I would recommend linking to your website rather than your github everywhere you mention it, to give it a boost
Google and Brave linked to the official GitHub repo followed by the fake domain. DuckDuckGo and Bing linked to the fake domain first, followed by the official GitHub. Mojeek gave higher ranking to two third party articles, but linked to both the official GitHub and website without fakes. Qwant was the worst, as the official website was the second result amongst multiple fake websites and an unrelated GitHub repo.
Then there the AIs. ChatGPT, Google AI mode, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, and Brave Search "Ask" all linked to the official website, and some added the GitHub repo as well. DuckDuckGo Search Assist linked to just the official GitHub. Google AI mode, Gemini and Grok also explicitly warned about the fake websites. Copilot got the official website and GitHub right, but linked to a presumably fake X account as well.
Conclusion: Google, Brave and Mojeek win in search. AI is very good and clearly beats search overall. Google AI mode, Gemini and Grok stand out in quality.
I appreciate that you open source your projects for us to study. But TBH, please help yourself first.
The obvious risk here is a bait and switch, where one of these sites switches their link to the Github repo to point to a malicious imitator repo instead.
One approach would be to go after the sites themselves, not their Google ranking. See if their hosts are willing to take them down. Is there anything you can assert copyright over to hang a DCMA request on? That's hard for an Open Source project, I guess. And the fake sites aren't (yet) doing any actual scamming.
Good luck, though!
What's maddening about this whole situation though is that Google already has every signal it needs. The GitHub repo links to nanoclaw.dev. The npm package links to it. The commit history proves authorship. But apparently domain age and raw backlink count still trump verified ownership signals. The system rewards whoever stakes out the domain first, not whoever actually built the thing.
Unfortunately, the fake website [.net] is also #3 on Kagi, and #1 on Duckduckgo. On Kagi, the Github is #1 and nanoclaw.dev is #4, but only if you count "Interesting Finds". On Duckduckgo, the Github is #2 and nanoclaw.dev is nowhere to be found.
But for entities with a bit more time, you can prevent this scenario by taking acquiring the .com/.net variant domains before launching.
The weird bit isn’t that a scraper site exists, it’s that Google can’t do the obvious graph join: query == project name, #1 result is the repo, repo declares Homepage = X, yet Google still boosts an imposter domain. That’s not “SEO”, that’s the ranking system refusing to treat maintainer-declared canonical as a strong signal. Early domain squatters get to “set the default” purely by being first, then they can flip the content later once trust is baked in.
People keep saying “tell users to bookmark the real URL” like that scales. Most people will click the second link and assume it’s official. If Google can’t solve this class of problem, their “AI answers” are going to be a bigger mess than blue links ever were.
I assume the "I" here refers to Claude, who seemingly wrote the entire project AND the linked post.
The crux of the matter is that there's nothing that protects an open project besides reputation, and nowadays in the digital space it can be cheaply farmed.
Laws could help, but they only work when you undertake purposeful actions to be covered by them, like register a trademark, and it's never cheap.
Imagine you're in a local band playing shows. It's 3 month old and you have no issued records. A second band tighter with venues takes your name and starts performing under your moniker. You have no money to take that to court and good luck making a case. You can't do anything besides screaming on the web or, don't know, kicking a few butts. You change your name.
A lot of handwringing about hypotheticals. The page is up there because it links the official repo. Changing that will quickly tank its search rank.
I've tested on a few of the big search engines, and nanoclaw.dev is never in the first page.
Gemini was also unable to find the .dev, even in "Research Mode." The only way I was able to get a direct link to nanoclaw.dev was with chatgpt, which found it by scraping the GitHub (it also spat out links to a couple of other copies it found from google.)
Seems this is a wider SEO issue, one which infiltrates even the technology supposed to replace it.
By the sound of it, everything except reporting it? Winning SEO just means appear before them in search results, but the fake page shouldn't just lose the race, it should be taken down.
ICANN specifies how to deal with this kind of issue: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/submitting-dns-a...
Is Google supposed to have drastic updates to its index over 2 weeks?
Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Brave all had the github repo and nanoclaw.net (the fake homepage) in the first or second place. Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results, not the github repo or either the fake or real homepage.
Mojeek was the exception, sort of. It had some random news sites up top, but the github repo in 2nd place and nanoclaw.dev (the real homepage) in the 4th place. The fake nanoclaw.net did not show.
Kagi is the only one I couldn't try because apparently I used up my free credits a year back. Can anyone see how they compare?
Get more traffic (make sure google analytics sees it, IDK but that probably matters because monopoly) and it might help.
Most of the other indices aren’t much better. Turns out fighting spam is expensive, easier to just do a combo of boosting really big sites and blessed spammers that use your ad network.
Then just write code, build features, and fix bugs. Nobody is forcing you to fix search engines' problems. If you're not making money off of traffic, then why worry so much about SEO? Just do your thing. If it really bothers you, put a little note on your GitHub warning people about the fake site, and get on with your life.
- I hate that Google returns content farms instead of product web pages
- I hate that Google provides a page of 10 useful links, later links are just pure garbage. I think that something in Google engine is profoundly broken
- I maintain my own search index, but it requires a lot of effort, and attention. I do insert links if I find them worthy. I think more people should have their personal search indexes. Mine is below. I am quite happy that problems like these do not affect me that much
Sorry, but this is a SEO problem. The fake site has probably been linked to by a number of high-SEO outlets. What you should do is contact them and tell them to fix the links (to point to your site), which they should be happy to do.
Sorry, I'll put it in hand-crafted ChatGPTese:
## The Slop Problem
Every post sounds the same. No intelligence. No individuality. Just pure, clean LLM slop. Let's dive in.
- Every post has LLM tells. This is key.
- Posts get upvoted anyway. Nobody seems to notice or indeed care.
- People acclimate to the slop. This isn't just a coincidence. This is a real shift in standards. When people read enough of this, they begin to think it sounds normal.
## The Replying Dilemma
Should you engage with the content, when there is a real person involved? On the one hand, they put their name on it, and probably the details are drawn from their prompt, so it can be said to fairly represent what they wanted to say. So maybe ragging on their ChatGPT prose is being mean. On the other hand, if nobody ever mentions this, the acclimatization will only get worse as the rising tide of slop overwhelms any other style of writing.
## The "Snobbery is good actually" Option
Relentlessly bully people for their half-baked LLM copy. Make it your whole personality. Go insane.
## The "Giving Up" Solution
Learn to stop worrying and love the LLM.
Curation in general is probably a skill that will become more and more in demand as the Internet fills up with AI slop.
Another point but DDG's AI feature actually references Nanoclaw.net as a source.
Damn I booted up Orion (Kagi) and even Kagi shows nanoclaw.net as the third result after the github page with qwibitai and another github page with your (previous?) github username ie gavrielc which when clicked on also results to the same github page.
There is an interesting find page in kagi which references the website but it still shows nanoclaw.net page earlier and the nanoclaw.dev interesting find shows the .dev domain barely that in first time I didn't even notice it.
I expected it better from DDG/Kagi to be honest. I also tried brave and it had the same issue. Brave even is its own independent index and even that struggles with.
Let's hope that this can quickly get patched though. Also a good reminder to people to prefer opening up github links than websites as I must admit that even as a tech-savvy person I could've fallen for nanoclaw.net link as well given its second in like all search engines.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260301133636/https://www.there... https://web.archive.org/web/20260211162657/https://venturebe... https://web.archive.org/web/20260220201539/https://thenewsta...
Thousands of little weights driven by obscure attributes of the site that you're not really going to figure out by thrashing and changing stuff.
With so many copycats on the internet, first to publish seems like a fairly good indication of the original source. But as we can see here, that's not always true.
Neither of these projects anything requiring payment anywhere, but tons of sites pop up trying to "sell" these projects. I wouldn't even know what that means and I'm kind of tempted to drop in a credit card to see what happens. Would they auto send you a link to the public repo?
Most of it is quite lazy and haven't quite kept up with modern AI capabilities. They mostly just scrape the text I wrote, and present it with some screenshots that I created. I can imagine a future where
- really nice landing pages are generated
- the product is entirely rebranded
- marketing is automated (linkedin, google ads, etc)
and someone can develop some autonomous system that basically finds high quality, yet unknown open source projects, and redeploys it and sells it online for actual money.
Sadly, Google's generally better against all the new AI-generated content farms than other players, so maybe they're still running PageRank somewhere.
Github only has authority because people put their shit there; if people want to point that back at the "right" website, Github should be helping facilitate that, instead of trying to help Google make their dogshit search index any better.
I mean, seriously, doesn't Bing own Github anyway?
Then I tried opening up google.com. and this works too. I didn't know that websites resolve when you add another additional dot after TLD. This was a really fun coincidence type thing so I wanted to share it with you.
Unsurprisingly, right? Gemini just uses the same back end as Google itself, which - according to OP - doesn't list his site on page 1, not page 2 and not page 5.
Depending on the prompt, it should have gotten the link from the github, but that's like an indirect hint from a secondary source, it probably ranks the Google index quite highly when it does research.
The fake site:
- includes a copyright statement
- includes a bottom sitemap
- includes an "author" meta-tag
- includes a sameAs to discord "nanoclaw", where the real site references some random string discord server
- has a .net instead of a .dev
Given all that plus the PageRank feedback loop of the .net having been up longer and enough people having found what they're looking for from it to not trigger Google's low-quality signals, author is fighting an uphill battle here; the squatters know what they're doing.
Plus based on the results it’s not entirely clear that only the ad part are ads. Especially around certain topics where money is involved, the Google first page is often showing companies that could profit from traffic
Optimizing for ad revenue is a good start.
It was 100% a game of whack-a-mole. And while we were a reputation raiser, we were always combatting against reputation tarnishers. Car dealerships already have a bad reputation to begin with, but they hate eachother more than their customers hate them. They were our bread and butter. Same with tradespeople (plumbing, electrical, hvac, handy(wo)men).
Google linking to a fake website directly underneath the real project's repository that has a real link to the real website isn't a SEO problem, lol.
It's slop all the way down.
If I was the author, however, I'd still feel like I've been put in a predicament where I need to spend personal agency to fix something that Google has broken.
While that may just be a fact of life, my internal injustice-o-meter would be raging. Like, Google is going to take hours of my life because they, with all their billions of capital, can't figure out the canonically-true website when it's RIGHT THERE in the GitHub repository?
Ugh. I guess that's just the day we live in. But it makes me rage against the machine on the author's behalf.
We (as in the team that helped fork and migrate the PoE1 wiki) setup a new domain for the Path of Exile 2 wiki, which is being hosted by the folks at Grinding Gear Games and linked on the official website and in multiple places on the highly trafficked subreddit.
Despite this, Google has decided that the site is not relevant and shouldn't appear anywhere in search results, despite the wiki for the first game appearing everywhere.
"If I search for "opencode GitHub" in Bing, a random fork is returned"
These days I even find e. g. qwant sometimes having better results than google search. I see it as a positive thing though - I can soon stop using Google search. So one less Google product. One day I will be Google free. It will be a happy day. I really think Google must cease to exist.
(The only sad thing is how crap the other search engines are. So while Google search sucks nowadays, I consistently get even worse results with e. g. DuckDuckGo. And I think part of the reason is because the world wide web also sucks a LOT more compared to the old days. Google is also partially responsible for this by the way, which just reinforces the idea that Google must die.)
I read an interesting blog article on this a while back: https://lacot.org/blog/2024/10/29/the-trailing-dot-in-domain...
Google doesn't care more about authoritative answers than the public does; the public is one of Google's signals for good-quality results.
Instead it seems like there's a solid core of people who have always wanted to outsource their brains entirely to machines, and have finally got their wish.
I'm old enough to remember when we joked about normies who were dumb enough to let computers think for them.
I have also written a more detailed comparison comparing all search providers that I could find, perhaps it might be of interest to ya but only Mojeek/(yandex.ru with the nanoclaw.dev/ru) were able to reference it earlier than .net
I have been an happy user of DDG for many time. I trust DDG significantly more than Google and I am happy that you guys could read such feedback!
Have a nice day DDG team!
No it's not, it's a sales pitch that intentionally ignores some of the things pointed out in the article. The author has invested time into proper SEO optimization, legit websites already link to it et cetera, it's all explained in the article.
From the perspective of a spammer: They need like 2 million MAU to earn below minimum wage. You're never getting those figures by doing something legit and actually useful to a tiny subset of people. You either need a vague site beyond any point of usefulness to anyone or you need a network of knockoff sites. The reason you can't compete with these shitty SEO spam version of your site is because they already have a network of "authoritative" (in Google's eyes) sites and all they have to do is to link from them to a new one to expand their shitty network.
From the perspective of SEO agencies: They can't guarantee results. They can tell you vague, easily-googleable best practices and give you an output of some SEO SaaS that's far too expensive for an individual to purchase. Ahrefs(.com) is the prime example of this, the cheapest paid version costs $129/month. Do you care about SEO that much? No, so you go to these agencies and give them money for them to give you the output of such a tool. But that SaaS also only contains vague and nebulous "things to fix" to follow "best practices" because they also cannot know what drives traffic to your competitor from the outside perspective.
My best suggestion would be to start a website from day one. Doesn't matter how good the website is at first, Google favours sites that exist for longer. If you're creating a website after the knock-off version already exist, you might as well give up immediately, it's gonna be near impossible to recover from that.
Just do a bit of risk assessment if something like this were to be shipped to people that have come to blindly trust the source and you'll see why letting this slip is a very bad idea.
Have given a glance through it but I am also bookmarking to read it later once I get more free. Thanks for sharing it!
From the article:
> Wait, what? I can put a dot at the end of my domain names?
This was exactly how I felt at that moment :) The article has started pretty nicely.
Sales pitch or not, someone offering their time to help me with a problem is feels generous to me. To each their own, I suppose.
But again, you reinforce my point in your last sentence. Now anytime I want to make any little toy project (because how can anyone know when their toy project will blow up overnight?) I have to make a full blown website just to ensure I don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion?
My point still stands. Google is the problem and while we likely can't effectively do anything about it, it's frustrating as hell.
If I were you, I would start with some documentation:
https://schema.org/docs/gs.html
https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication
https://schema.org/Organization
The first link will get you started - it will explain what the commenter was talking about in detail. The second and third links will give you more information on those specific types.
Good luck with your site!
> I have to make a full blown website just to ensure I don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion?
No, I said a crappy one on purpose. How good is it doesn't matter, the sooner the Google knows about the domain, the better. Might as well be a copy of your README file using one of the million SSGs GitHub supports that will turn that README file into a website. The only thing that matters is that the website exists and that Google knows about it before the other one.
That's why many people purchase the domain on day 1 before they even start building the thing and also why many have like a dozen domains in their account that is like a boulevard of broken dreams there to remind them once a year they haven't done anything with them.
Still cheaper than a SEO agency or in most cases even one month of ahrefs access.