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 exams carried out on March 5, an impostor website ranked on the high of Google for the challenge’s personal title. 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 different to OpenClaw, the viral open supply AI agent platform. The challenge grew shortly. VentureBeat covered it, The Register profiled Cohen, and AI researcher Andrej Karpathy publicly praised the challenge’s structure.
Round February 8, somebody registered nanoclaw.web and created an auto-generated website scraped from the challenge’s GitHub README. Cohen stated he didn’t have an internet site on the time as a result of the GitHub repo was the challenge.
Because the challenge gained press protection, folks stored 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 website positioning 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 overlaying the challenge linked to nanoclaw.dev.
As of March 5, the impostor website nonetheless ranked above the true one.
In his thread, Cohen wrote that the faux website is “displaying factually mistaken details about the challenge and falsifying its publication dates.” He referred to as the state of affairs “a stay, energetic safety threat” as a result of the individual working nanoclaw.web 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.
Identical Drawback 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 faux 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 faux website in high positions. Mojeek was the one engine examined that ranked the true website and excluded the faux one.
Why This Issues
Up to now, Google’s John Mueller said that copied content material persistently rating above the unique might level to a website high quality drawback. Mueller urged website homeowners reassess their general high quality if this retains occurring.
Cohen’s case exams that logic. His challenge has 18,000 GitHub stars, protection from CNBC, VentureBeat, and The Register, a Karpathy endorsement, and a weblog submit that hit #1 on Hacker Information. Each social profile and the GitHub repo itself level to nanoclaw.dev. On its face, most 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 potential issue is timing, because the faux 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 precise time to register a site. Cohen targeted on delivery code earlier than constructing an internet site. That’s commonplace open supply observe, however search engines like google and yahoo listed the impostor first, and correcting that after the actual fact proved tougher than any of the really helpful steps recommend it needs to be.
Trying Forward
Cohen has not indicated whether or not Google responded to his takedown requests. One website positioning practitioner within the Hacker Information thread offered concrete advice, together with mapping the faux website’s backlinks and contacting publications that by chance linked to the mistaken area.
The state of affairs stays unresolved. Google had not commented on the time of publishing.
Featured Picture: Elnur/Shutterstock
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