March 3, 2026
Google, meet the Spider‑Man meme
I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
Dev loses his own project on Google as fake site climbs the rankings and the internet loses its mind
TLDR: A popular open‑source project called NanoClaw is being overshadowed in search results by a fake, ad‑stuffed website, and the creator says it’s a real security risk. Commenters are split between blaming Google and all search engines, preaching alternative services, and offering rescue‑mission SEO advice with a side of drama.
An open‑source developer with a hit project called NanoClaw just discovered his worst nightmare: when people search for his creation, a sketchy copycat website shows up above his real site. He’s warning that this isn’t just embarrassing — it could become a giant scam funnel — and the comment section immediately turned it into a full‑blown internet tribunal for Google.
One camp is furious on his behalf, treating this like proof that search is broken. Commenters are calling it a “live security risk” and dragging Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and even paid search engine Kagi for serving the fake page. Others are more chill, saying, basically: breathe, it’s only been a week, the fake site just has stronger links from big news outlets, give the algorithms time. That “just do better SEO” line has become the villain of the thread.
Then come the colorful side characters. An SEO specialist jumps in like a caped consultant, offering to repair the mess for free and telling him to shame every newsroom that linked the wrong site. Privacy die‑hards use the chaos to yell “stop using Google” and plug Brave and niche engines. People start treating the NanoClaw search results like a science experiment, posting rankings from every search engine like baseball scores. The accidental comedy: even the fancy paid search engine some users worship… also fails the test, leading one commenter to ask why they’re still paying at all.
Key Points
- •NanoClaw is an open source project with about 18,000 GitHub stars and coverage from major tech and business publications, initially without an official website beyond its GitHub repository.
- •Around a week after launch, an unaffiliated party registered the domain nanoclaw[.]net, created an auto-generated site scraped from the project’s README, and filled it with ads and inaccurate information.
- •Google now ranks the fake nanoclaw[.]net site as the #2 search result for 'NanoClaw', below the project’s GitHub repository, while the genuine NanoClaw website does not appear on early results pages.
- •The project creator has taken multiple corrective actions, including implementing SEO and structured data on the real site, linking it from GitHub, submitting it repeatedly to Google Search Console, localizing into 15 languages, updating social profiles, securing media backlinks, and filing takedown notices with Google, Cloudflare, and the domain registrar.
- •The author warns that the fake site represents a live security risk because its operator could add scams, phishing content, or malicious code while benefiting from Google’s high ranking for users explicitly searching for NanoClaw.