> How could it rank higher tho? SO has a huge ___domain ranking. How an arbitrary website can compete with that?

It's unclear, but they do. My guess would be that they're willing to do shadier SEO than SO will, and any that get caught just stand up more domains.

It's usually temporary, until Google tags the copycat site as a spammy content farm and destroys its ability to rank. I haven't seen a site sustain high ranking / lots of traffic through copying Stackoverflow in maybe a decade at this point (since Panda etc.).

It doesn't matter, though. It's a hydra. Different sites over time but the result is that google results on programming topics are reliably, and increasingly, shit. I gave up on it and pay for Kagi.

It doesn't need to sustain it, it just needs to be there when you search. I generally get SO first, but I see a LOT of copycats on the first page of DDG/Google when I search.

Even if it doesn't, you now suddenly have the top 20+ results with the exact same info

That's why I have Firefox bookmarks where I type `s <query>` into the address bar which enters `site:stackoverflow.com <query>` into my search engine. Likewise for `r <query>` => `site:reddit.com <query>`.

This annihilates the SEO spam and is useful for most of my searches. It's glorious finding recipe ingredients without wading through a blogger's life story or a search result page filled exclusively with ads above the fold.

They probably rank higher on long tail keywords. Usually for more in the weeds issues that don't get as much search volume

>How could it rank higher tho?

Because they sell more clicks, impressions, etc...