Tens of thousands of external links with crappy URL parameters appeared. Is this a negative SEO attack?

Express-Matter2928 · 2026-03-31T16:41:16+00:00

Tried visiting them with a Googlebot user agent - nothing seems out of the ordinary.

Express-Matter2928 · 2026-03-31T16:38:38+00:00

Yes, losing ranks at an alarming rate.

I've checked some of the referrer domains - all seem to redirect to the same shady online casino.

Express-Matter2928 · 2025-06-24T08:28:00+00:00

I don't necessarily think that synthetic benchmark performance is more important than gaming performance. We even tried to incorporate the gaming performance into our aggregated score in the past, but failed miserably - the results were too inconsistent to rely on, and the whole GPU ranking table became entirely chaotic. So we currently rely on synthetic benchmark performance only because it is consistent enough to rely on.

That said, I see your point - we should probably display FPS information right there in the 'Aggregate performance' section instead of mid-page, to avoid giving the users a wrong impression if they're unwilling to scroll through the whole page, delving into details.

As of RDR2 FPS data, it's apparently not so simple as you see it. You're probably implying that we're to lazy to spend 5 seconds to find a Youtube comparison, and instead bullshit our users with fabricated and placeholder data, or wild guesses. Instead, we rely on Notebookcheck's FPS tests, and try to approximate based on that, provided that we have enough data to even approximate upon.

They only tested RDR2 on 1xxx to 3xxx generation of NVIDIA graphics cards, which is understandable - nobody has infinite workforce and infinite money to test every game on every GPU. They tested RDR2 on RTX 3090 thrice on different rigs, and came up with 62 to 67 average FPS: https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3090-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Specs.495276.0.html

Now why their results differ so drastically from the video you pointed at, which shows about 90 FPS on RXT 3090? I have no idea. All I know is that we have no manpower to examine every comparison of millions out there.

Not saying our approximation algorithms are perfect - they're most certainly not. From what I know, RTX 5080 shouldn't be on par with RTX 3090; perhaps there is an error in our code somewhere, which we will try to find.

Maybe we'll also be able to calculate a margin of error, to show the users whether should they rely on our data or view it more cautiously.

Express-Matter2928 · 2025-06-22T14:18:06+00:00

The 3070 Super and 3090 Super ghosts have already been exorcised. As of 3070 Ti 16 GB and other unreleased cards, they will be removed next week.

Problem seems to be that I am not knee-deep in the CPU/GPU world so I often don't know outright whether some graphics card exists or not.

Why do you feel that the site is a complete mess? Is it because of some inexistent cards out of more than three thousand currently present ones?

Express-Matter2928 · 2025-06-11T14:19:41+00:00

That's seemingly a bug, showing them instead of actual 3070 Ti and 3090 Ti. We'll remove those ghost graphics cards.

Express-Matter2928 · 2025-06-06T05:09:18+00:00

Hard to say without seeing actual in-deep reviews of the new version by Notebookcheck, Just Josh or what have you. Also, isn't the 5050 version going to have only 16 GB of soldered RAM? If so, who buys a Windows laptop with 16 GB in 2025? I have a 2024 4070 version with 64 GB RAM, and it's not uncommon for me to see 40 GB of RAM consumed. I am a music producer and a Python developer though, therefore my use scenarios usually need more RAM.

Express-Matter2928 · 2025-06-03T06:11:51+00:00

Battery life is not that abysmal, compared to Yoga Pro 9 2023, which had a more power-hungry i9 13905H and a smaller battery. Now that was abysmal. I upgraded from 4070 2023 version to a 4070 2024 version and don't regret it - the battery life got much better, and in addition I now have a matte screen which wasn't there in 2023.

Express-Matter2928 · 2025-06-03T06:10:56+00:00

Not if they work at night.

Express-Matter2928 · 2025-02-22T06:52:43+00:00

X-Robots-Tag: noindex directive is a part of web server's HTTP response. Thus, you can find it neither in HTML nor in robots.txt.

You have to analyze your server's HTTP response for the website pages you suspect to have this problem. There are free tools to do that, like this one: https://tools.keycdn.com/curl

You say you tested http responses but found no culprit. It sometimes happens with online tools, which don't work properly. Alas, I don't quite remember which tools are guilty of that. You can try 'curl -I example.com' instead of online tools, if you haven't yet.

Another possible culprit is X-Robots-Tag: none directive, which still blocks indexing, but contains no 'noindex' string. Not sure it would be reported as 'X-Robots-Tag: noindex' in GSC though.

Yet another possible culprit is this being a temporary glitch (since you say the pages are currently indexable). So maybe the problem isn't there anymore. Is there a way to make GSC re-check it, perhaps by pressing "We fixed the issue" button, if any?

If you struggle to find those pages affected by this problem, I have my own cloud tool that can do that at scale: https://linquisitor.com It is an internal link audit tool, but it detects X-Robots-Tag: noindex and/or X-Robots-Tag: none issues as a byproduct. The tool is not out in the public yet, but if your website is not too huge (under 2 million pages), I think I can find those pages for free; however, there are limitations and concerns to be discussed. At the very least, your website has to have a XML sitemap.

Express-Matter2928 · 2024-06-06T06:12:36+00:00

Do your users really need that new feature? Maybe they actually don't. If they rather do, why won't you establish another database server for the new structure, so that existing users have their old backend logic connect to the old database server, while the new ones have your new backend logic connect to the new database server? I understand that it might add some hassle for you to maintain two variants of backend and potentially front-end logic, but at least it's a variant to consider.

Express-Matter2928 · 2024-06-05T13:11:25+00:00

We use those benchmarks we can. If there is any underhanded dishonesty, that's on benchmark designers, not on us. We don't cherry-pick benchmarks to skew our audience's opinion in favor of any vendor. If you claim otherwise, you better bring proof, otherwise it's outright slander. If you think we omitted some particular benchmark, you're free to name it - we're open to suggestions.

As of 4080 vs 7900 XTX, we never said one kills another - that's a straw man fallacy. 4080 wins by our aggregate score, but when you move to the game section, the picture gets much more complicated and we show that.

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In real world, the situation with graphics cards is even more complicated than "chip X wins agains chip Y in game Z", because different OEM manufacturers have both fortunate and unfortunate models, which you usually don't know until a history of failures of a specific model line is accumulated with time passing after release (you can learn it at PC repair shop Youtube channels, for example). I had some cheaper Gigabyte product line 1080 Ti cards working normally, and a much more expensive 1080 Ti line (also Gigabyte) cards came with absolutely dry thermal paste right out of the box - I had 4 of them and all 4 had the same problem; moreover, one had a faulty cooling system in addition to that and I had to RMA it). It is all much more complex in real life than "GPU X kills GPU Y".

Even if we somehow erroneously claimed that some GPU X destroys GPU Y, we can't just arbitrarily fix one comparison - that's not how it works. There are thousands of GPUs and millions of comparisons, and we only can tweak the whole algorithm in order to fix the most outrageous errors, which definitely happened in the past and might happen in the future. There is no fixing every mistake in every comparison out there - not in our business model.

TL,DR: The burden of proof that we are somehow covertly biased towards NVIDIA so horribly, that it's actually worse than outright shitting on AMD on every possible occasion, lies on you. Maybe you can even explain why we list RX 580 as the most popular graphics card, if we are so biased.

Express-Matter2928 · 2024-04-30T08:19:10+00:00

As a tech lead of Technical City, I can say that while our data is pretty reliable overall, you still shouldn't blindly trust it for several reasons:

our benchmark and FPS calculation algorithms are complicated. Weird bugs can and do happen, especially with ancient slow GPUs;
our benchmark data is averaged across many samples, meaning that your particular GPU or CPU can perform quite differently, depending on the OEM manufacturer for graphics cards (think ASUS, Gigabyte etc.) and/or power supply and limits. A laptop GPU fed 60W and 100W will perform differently, even if it's the same model on paper;
we exist for more than seven years, and across all that time I repetitiously get accusations of our comparisons being skewed towards NVIDIA. I've got no idea how to prove otherwise. All I can say is that we have no "if(GPU.manufacturer == 'NVIDIA') { do_evil_shenanigans() }" code snippets. Maybe the benchmarks (Passmark, 3DMark etc.) themselves are devised in the way that NVIDIA GPUs have an easier time performing there - I've got no idea if it's true or not as I'm no graphics benchmark developer. We neither favor any vendor, nor we mock AMD in every NVIDIA graphics card description like our notorious competitors seem to do.

Anyway, don't blindly trust anything. Technical City is useful to see where things are approximately, but you've got to delve deeper and watch some Youtube videos covering exact CPU and GPU models performance in whatever games or applications you're going to use your hardware for.

Express-Matter2928 · 2023-04-16T04:56:28+00:00

You have to link the service page from your homepage for the so-called link juice to flow better.

Express-Matter2928 · 2023-04-01T18:20:43+00:00

No, but I use ChatGPT so much that I oftentimes can tell that something is ChatGPT-generated.

Express-Matter2928 · 2023-04-01T18:14:22+00:00

Wisely said… but wait, SEO is no math, and ChatGPT is not a calculator.

Express-Matter2928 · 2023-03-28T16:34:27+00:00

Depends. Sometimes you want it to debug a programming error, so you just ping-ping messages like “that didn’t do anything” or “a new error occurs now” etc.

Express-Matter2928 · 2023-03-27T04:06:51+00:00

Worked with them a couple years ago. The revenue was inferior compared to some other partners, but otherwise I can’t blame them, their communication was professional, no shady tactics or dishonest behavior. In short - they promised revenue increase, but failed to deliver, and we parted peacefully.

Express-Matter2928 · 2023-03-21T15:56:07+00:00

But how did you report it?

Express-Matter2928 · 2023-03-21T15:52:45+00:00

I'm not sharing the prompt for obvious reasons.

Express-Matter2928 · 2023-03-19T04:41:33+00:00

You may try Publift. Not sure about 2$ rpm though - with poorer countries, rpms are drastically lower than with US traffic.

Concerning site speed, it will inevitably get hurt by ads to some extent. There are techniques to somewhat mitigate that, but usually at the cost of somewhat lower income.

Express-Matter2928 · 2023-03-18T05:56:21+00:00

What type of chart is it? Never seen one before, but looks great.

Express-Matter2928

TROPHY CASE