, do something about this blatant SEO spamming! This is the second time I've seen a particular vendor's website for a service based on FOSS showing up featured above the actual FOSS tool's official documentation. Not cool.
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They place enormous value on authority / trust attributed to the domain by their algorithms. It's increasingly difficult to compete with prominent domains in the search results even if there are far more links to your relevant results, etc. It's a consequence of their anti-spam.
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Another issue is that git-scm.com isn't a mobile friendly site and as far as I know desktop results are influenced by whether a site is mobile friendly, starting with <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/> and making sure it scales.
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If there's no viewport configuration, it opens up on mobile as a zoomed out desktop site rather than scaling it to the screen. Setting up the viewport metadata states that it's a mobile friendly site and sizes it to the screen. Sidebar would definitely need to be changed, etc.
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It's not a competition for top search result. The official doc is the top search result. It's the inline snippet (I forget what Google calls them) from a non-authoritative source *above the search results* that's the problem.
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I think the authority / trust of the domain matters even more for the inline answers though. There are many cases where popular, mainstream sites give them bogus information but they're far more likely to use those than small sites since the algorithms don't trust them enough.
It would definitely have a better chance of ranking higher in results and being used for answers if it was a more modern site though including being mobile friendly (often just means adding <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/> for minimal sites).
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My goal isn't to get git-scm in the featured snippet. It's to get Google to stop adding new spam vectors. The featured inline answer snippets are actively harmful. I highlighted this one as an example of that, not in hopes of getting someone else featured there.
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Indeed. But they should just not do either. Kill the inline answers. They're toxic to the web ecosystem.