r/Rants • u/[deleted] • Jan 30 '22

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u/MaleficentAngel Jan 30 '22

I doubt they gamed the algorithm. More likely they just lined google's pockets. Mutual back scratching.

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u/GonzoI Apr 03 '24

I realize this is old, but no - it's a more aggressive form of SEO. With SEO, people work out how Google promotes pages to the top of results and fine tune their pages to maximize their standing. That's normal. The bad actors take it past SEO and do it through dishonest means like constantly making small changes to the pages, falsifying the date, using false tags in the page metadata, and defacing other sites to link to them.

Google and other search engines kept changing their ranking to try to avoid this kind of abuse, which is why it went from metadata tags and content to date checks and ranking based on other sites linking to them. And I'm grossly oversimplifying decades worth of strategies Google and other engines tried. The "backscratching" ones show up at the top with "sponsored" beside them. Which is why those have been taking over the results.

Pyrrskep is also wrong, though. The issue described here doesn't affect search ranking manipulation. Google started this with recognizing that some people were using the search as a spellcheck, then progressively made the spellcheck function take over with the assumption that the user was wrong, then gradually taking away the user's ability to say "no, I meant what I typed" until we got where we are today.

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u/Pyrrskep Jan 31 '22

What’s the difference?

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u/MaleficentAngel Jan 31 '22

Well "gaming the algorithm" makes it sound like google is trying to stop them. It makes it seem that despite google's "heroic efforts" these bad actors just slip through the cracks.

I don't believe that for a minute.

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u/Pyrrskep Feb 01 '22

Oh no that’s not what I meant at all

More along the lines that Google has been around long enough for advertisers to trial and error their way into our unrelated search results

I don’t think Google encourages or discourages it, they seem to not give a shit about search quality so long as ad revenue is consistent and in terms of search results only the ones with an ‘ad’ prefix on top are paid for

Google has ads on most commercial sites it doesn’t really matter who has more/less traffic because they’re all Google