Amazing how such a simple approach can achieve content injection on a diverse network of unrelated websites, to the point of raising the profile of the vector and increasing the chances of further spread.I hope someone figures out which other campaigns were run with these tools. Also, whether you can find output with the link injections in source code, like on GitHub or distro packages.

I only switched Google Analytics off last week! I had it on for the whole time before and it made no difference.

I think they will use it for a fallback description so it could affect the CTR.  But one that short probably doesn&#x27;t really help.

&gt; I&#x27;d put my money that they included &#x27;online scoreboard&#x27; as the first phrase in the `&lt;meta name=&quot;description&quot; content=&quot;Online scoreboard&quot;&gt; tag per Google&#x27;s recommendations for SEO which put them ahead.[0] Also, to this one point of many when searching for `online leaderboard` you get the top spot because leaderboard is not included in the other website&#x27;s description.While I like the thought progression you&#x27;re going through, this is a &quot;not really.&quot; Google has confirmed a number of times over the past 15+ years (going back to the Matt Cutts era) and even in the document you linked that the meta description does nothing to influence ranking in the SERPs. However, the meta title does influence ranking.I&#x27;m on mobile, so unable to dig in right now - but my guess is either this has something to do with the meta title, or the specific anchor text of the backlinks that are getting inserted via the app in question.Aside from that, agree 100% with your other assessments.

This. The number of sites you see following pretty much none of Google&#x27;s suggestions or industry practice, but dominating search results due to a combination of content and links, is massive. If people stopped and thought about what they&#x27;re looking at, the &quot;selling technical SEO knowledge&quot; industry would pretty much die.

This (and another comment you made deeper down) make me think you may be stuck on the mechanical&#x2F;technical side of SEO. While it is important, it is not nearly as important as it used to be, say 10 years ago. It&#x27;s probably much less than 50% of your overall ranking. Yes, you need to get it right, but relevant back links and the associated link text on the sites linking TO you will have a far greater affect. Google prioritizes what OTHERS say about your site more than any factors you can control. Mainly because people abuse those factors significantly.

I&#x27;d put my money that they included &#x27;online scoreboard&#x27; as the first phrase in the `&lt;meta name=&quot;description&quot; content=&quot;Online scoreboard&quot;&gt; tag per Google&#x27;s recommendations for SEO which put them ahead.[0] Also, to this one point of many when searching for `online leaderboard` you get the top spot because leaderboard is not included in the other website&#x27;s description.The network tab in devtools isn&#x27;t loading Google Analytics on you site. I think the bigger conspiracy is that Google isn&#x27;t giving high search result rankings to websites that don&#x27;t include Google Analytics. Part of the reason is they use time on site after following through a search result link as a dimension of quality for that search result. If that makes sense? They give 10 search results and their algorithm can tell if the search result satisfies the end user&#x27;s request if they don&#x27;t go back to the search results but rather continue on that site.Lastly, clicking through a search result to your site might not give the searching user what they are looking for. Amazon discovered every time a person has to click they are far less likely to purchase an item so they created one click. Your competition makes it visually clear what their site does. You probably would get far more retention on the original click to your site if you have an image of what the end product looks like in a hero, front and center (with all the meta tags described in Google&#x27;s document on SEO of course.) That way people won&#x27;t click back to the search results page which Google is tracking as a dimension.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;www.google.dk&#x2F;en&#x2F;dk&#x2F;webmasters&#x2F;docs&#x2F;search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;www.google.dk&#x2F;en&#x2F;...</a>

Those can both be true. PageRank is a relic of a time when search engines more consistently returned the same results for the same query. These days we&#x27;re all filter bubbled with personalized results

They may have abandoned the actual page-rank scoring system (a quite specific implementation) without wholly abandoning the idea of using &quot;who links to who&quot; as a quality signal.

I&#x27;ve heard so much about how PageRank isn&#x27;t that important to Google anymore -- but there are many reports of SEO tricks that get people on the first page of Google for common queries.  It seems like it&#x27;s still quite important after all.

True. A company we bought in the very early 2000&#x27;s was paying $1000 a month to an SEO &quot;expert&quot;. The expert hadn&#x27;t noticed that the site had a robots.txt file that was excluding all search bots but was still happy to take their money and produce faked up reports about how busy they&#x27;d been pushing search terms around.

There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that represented you) made a point of understanding everything that went into it.I&#x27;ve been making websites for 24 years. Making a website has always been quite hard, especially for a nontechnical user, and there has always been scammers happy to take their money. What&#x27;s worse is that a lot of the time the scammers believe they&#x27;re actually selling a good service. There have always been people happy to chuck any old rubbish up on a domain and call it a website, even if it was full of scammy links, stuffed keywords the same color as the background or in tiny text, with JS that overwrote your browser history and blocked the back button, with no context menu, etc etc.Its annoying, and sad, for those of us who care and consider ourselves professional. But it definitely wasn&#x27;t any better years ago.

What they value is the users, not the platform as such.

I agree, there has been a clear, negative direction of stacking complexity in Web development for the past 20 years. It&#x27;s one of the primary reasons Wordpress has 1&#x2F;3 of the Web and there is a cottage industry of developers that specialize in just hacking at Wordpress to make it do things it&#x27;s not particularly great at. Most people and most businesses can&#x27;t come remotely close to building their own high-functioning sites (from scratch) in a cost effective manner, while getting all the critical details (eg building for SEO) right. So you get an obese do-everything CMS, and throw in some plug-ins, to sort of shim the problem.Why is Shopify worth $150 billion? Well, other than the bubble, this effect is why. People can&#x27;t easily build their own ecommerce sites, can&#x27;t integrate everything they need to, in a way that doesn&#x27;t cost them a small fortune.Wix is a pretty mediocre service, clunky and slow. It&#x27;s worth $15 billion? How in the world does that happen. Well, building sites is super difficult for most people. The opportunity to make that problem better is, apparently, huge.

You could modify the web server to modify the code in a similar way to the reflections paper.But even more imaginative would be to work it into the kernel or the ssl layer somehow.

Feels similar to &quot;Reflections on Trusting Trust&quot;.Could someone inject links into content in such a way that you cannot find the link in your own source or even your hosting stack?

I suspect this will only get worse over time. There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that represented you) made a point of understanding everything that went into it. But, even as what&#x27;s considered a professional web site has gotten exponentially more complicated, too many people see setting up an online presence as something like printing a brochure: details irrelevant. Somebody who does understand the details is going to use them to their advantage.

Clearly. But I guess it is not outright proven that they are technically buying links. Though they would likely fall under some form of bad behavior in Google&#x27;s eyes.And, buying or otherwise, I am not sure what the mechanism is for bringing this to Googles attention.I doubt there is another acquisition channel for a project like this that would compare to SEO (and not just Google).

&gt; paying for links is still very much against Google’s policies.quite a strange think to say about a company whose bussiness is based on selling links (to ads)

If I’m not mistaken, paying for links is still very much against Google’s policies. Whatever weight that should carry... in my opinion you should always try to be as independent from Google as possible. It’s such a huge liability.

Probably. It&#x27;d be weird for a SEO spammer to put the effort into building a popular HTML editor&#x2F;optimizer just to inject links to a few sites they own and operate. It&#x27;s far more likely that they&#x27;re offering that link injection as a service.

Agreed. Sure seems that way. Though that may actually make it less likely to be a violation than if one was paying the other for the links. Not within the spirit of the terms, but may not be a violation either.

&gt; as opposed to them being the owner&#x2F;developer of both sites?If they&#x27;re not owned by the same entity, then this blog post is rather odd: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;html-online.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;scoreboard&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;html-online.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;scoreboard&#x2F;</a>(To be fair, that entire blog seems odd...)

Google used to impose manual penalties for unnatural links BUT this gave the rise to, you guessed it, competitors buying unnatural links for their enemy and waiting for the penalty to be given.Nowadays, unnatural links are mostly ignored.

Could it be that Scorecounter is paying for their links to be embedded, as opposed to them being the owner&#x2F;developer of both sites? If so, and provable, can they be flagged in some way?Doesn&#x27;t say much for Google&#x27;s ability to determine relevancy in linking or recognizing suspicious link growth. Or perhaps it just takes some time ...

You know better then me. But i hope that since what you are saying is easily provable there shouldn&#x27;t be any problem at all. Nice article, by the way.

No. People should name-and-shame more often in these sorts of scenarios.

It could be that they were acting in good faith and paid some SEO agency&#x2F;Guy unknowing what was going on.

Yikes, should I have shown more discretion in naming the competitor?

Several points; the title is slightly misleading, i initially thought (in my ignorance) that OP was referring to a company employee, also this article is surprisingly open in &#x27;naming and shaming&#x27; his competitor.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mattcutts.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;join-the-us-digital-service&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mattcutts.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;join-the-us-digital-service&#x2F;</a>wow that&#x27;s amazing, I guess I sort of quit reading blogs like this when all the RSS readers died.

Here you go: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mattcutts.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mattcutts.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;</a>

Not true, you can get penalized and you may be noticed about it in the google search console.

They state that they don&#x27;t manually pick results, but improve their algorythms to solve these problems. They prefer to share the least amount of details though, since it would better inform SEO spammers.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;how-google-interferes-with-its-search-algorithms-and-changes-your-results-11573823753" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;how-google-interferes-with-its-...</a> I&#x27;m sure that the title tells you that the article has an opinion (not unbiased), but I think it is a useful source.

I agree with some of the other comments, googles actions on SEO are always shrouded in a little &quot;algorithmic&quot; mystery. That said, they do apply &quot;manual action&quot; penalties to individual websites.Using google search console you can determine if a manual action has been applied to your own website: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;webmasters&#x2F;answer&#x2F;9044175?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;webmasters&#x2F;answer&#x2F;9044175?hl=en</a>Rather than determine the ranks, these actions remove &#x2F; punish offending websites from the ranks, effectively making room for &#x27;good&#x27; actors.Manual actions often come after a a significant change in ranking algorithm or policy, and can be reverted &#x2F; resolved in some cases. This usually requires removing or disavowing (in the case of unauthorized or unresponsive sites) the links pointing to a website.

You may want to dig into <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seobook.com&#x2F;blog" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seobook.com&#x2F;blog</a> for an opinionated (albeit typically objectively correct) perspective on many things related to the SEO industry. There are a few studies about Thumbtack (with GV investment), RapGenius and eBay penalties and their subsequent recoveries.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;webmasters&#x2F;answer&#x2F;9044175?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;webmasters&#x2F;answer&#x2F;9044175?hl=en</a>&gt;Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google&#x27;s webmaster quality guidelines. Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate our search index. Most issues reported here will result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual indication to the user.

I have little to no experience in SEO. Does Google have a history of weighing in on situations like this and manually penalizing bad actors? If so, I would love a link to read about.

Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?”Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…”Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?”Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!”Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.”<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;weblog.raganwald.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;07&#x2F;haggling-about-price.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;weblog.raganwald.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;07&#x2F;haggling-about-price.htm...</a>

What would you have the author do? Market his business or build it and let them come?

I&#x27;m so happy the author is an ethical SEO scammer and will not stoop to these tactics.

Wow that sucks. It&#x27;s not just HTML Cleaners though. A few years ago (before snowden) I analyzed free proxy servers and found that most of them blocked https and many even injected JS or HTML into all requests [1].I also wrote a tutorial on how you can build an infecting proxy too [2]. Doesn&#x27;t work anymore though since HTTPS is everywhere. Thank god[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.haschek.at&#x2F;2015-analyzing-443-free-proxies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.haschek.at&#x2F;2015-analyzing-443-free-proxies</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.haschek.at&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;why-free-proxies-are-free-js-infection.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.haschek.at&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;why-free-proxies-are-free-js...</a>

Well, that is unfortunately.In 2015 I was fired because some issues on a site that I was working on because some friction with the company owner. Two months before I was fired I reported that some links to others sites non related to our service was on the initial page (some porn and some scams pages). After that I heard from my ex-coworkers that a manager from another area from the company told that I was fired because I was linking porn on some pages from our service. I didn’t knew at the time that those tools existed, but only today I realized that it is an option.I was really sad with that manager and didn’t understood the reason to lie to my friends the reason of my demission. But is nice to know what may have caused the issue. Better late than never hahaha.

I swear, Pinterest must have employees working undercover in the Image Search team for Google to have let them destroy image search results the way they have.It&#x27;s literally never the original source for anything, but you can bet it&#x27;s most of the first 10 pages of results. Then it doesn&#x27;t even let you right click to open the image file, and dumps you to a login prompt if you click on anything. THAT&#x27;S NOT EVEN YOUR IMAGE STOP TELLING ME WHAT I CAN DO WITH IT.

I&#x27;d expect a company like google, who tracks what kind of socks you have on everyday, to also track their own search engine... users mistakingly clicks on pinterest link, user immediatly clicks back, and looks for something else... is it so hard to assume, that they don&#x27;t want pinterest results, because they&#x27;re useless, and somehow lower their seo score? Nooo, of course not, just put the pinterest results near the top, until users puts &quot;-pinterest&quot; in the search bar.

Free WordPress* themes are particularly bad in this regard. Since they&#x27;re expected to contain HTML anyway, it&#x27;s altogether too easy for the author of a theme to include a couple of links to a site they want to promote. Some themes take this to the next level by obfuscating the code that generates the promotional links, and&#x2F;or including other code which makes the site not work properly if the links are removed.*: and themes for other web applications, but mostly WordPress these days

Google is a cesspool because it’s their job to fix it and they failed.  I stopped using Google search because of how far it’s fallen.

If its the only way to make money, it doesn&#x27;t really feel like the burden is on the people to make a cleaner pool

Google’s mission was “organize the world’s information and make it useful” and they are doing a poorer job now than historically.Of course there are scammers, that’s part of what makes organizing so hard.Cynically, I think that Google is worse as filtering scammers is because they care less now. Half the page is ads so they make money either way.

google isn&#x27;t the cesspool, people who want to appear at the top of a list of search results are doing whatever it takes to create a cesspool, because that&#x27;s what it takes to earn more money.being willing to make other things in order to have more money always creates cesspools.

I ran into this for the first time yesterday when trying to find out new info about a footy player. Some article from 15 years ago talking about how he had a good first game, tagged as 5th june 2021. Like, wtf?

You can also do the opposite: post something today and say it was up on your site in 2003.Makes it really difficult to find old pages about something that recently exploded in popularity, because the age filter just doesn&#x27;t work.

I really don&#x27;t like how easy it is to fake a &quot;new&quot; article on Google. You can just re-publish an old article and stick a new date on it and Googles takes it on face value and uses the new date.

Any technical issue, really. There&#x27;s a ton of autogenerated content out there with low-effort troubleshooting tips. A lot of it is used as lead generation for scammy antivirus&#x2F;antimalware&#x2F;&quot;cleaner&quot; software, paid tech support, or outright tech support scams.

Also phone problems: Google a problem with a phone and the top hit will be a whole bunch of churned out articles with generic copy on the cause (sometimes there are bugs in the software, so reboot your phone).

I think it&#x27;s high time we had a webring resurgence. It&#x27;s impossible to get anywhere with plain search anymore, what we need is curated websites that other domain owners are happy to say &quot;I endorse the people running this site, so if like my stuff you&#x27;ll like them too&quot;

This is my view too. Yes, I’d love to go back to a time when Google’s algorithms were unknown enough for SEO to be futile but those days are gone and the problem isn’t limited to Google.

Indeed. I recently noticed this while relying on DDG for documentation for Common Lisp, a language I still learning. The top-ranking site for any Common Lisp function was an SEO scam site, where clearly someone had hired freelancers to take preexisting CLisp documentation and rewrite it – in poor-quality English – until it would no longer be detectable as copyright violation, then loaded it with ads.(I just checked and this copycat documentation site has, thankfully, now been pushed down a bit in DDG results.)

&gt; Google has turned into a cesspool.All these same sites appear near the top of Bing searches too. There&#x27;s nothing particularly Google-specific to this story. It&#x27;s about SEO hacking that will work against anyone with a PageRank-style system.

Great tip! I&#x27;ve been using DDG&#x27;s official addon but this means one less addon. Thanks!

Great idea. Though I&#x27;ve noticed DDG promotes &quot;blogspam&quot; articles more often than the authoritative sources.Let&#x27;s say, if I search for a python builtin library, I want to go to the python website, not some &quot;Python 101&quot; blog post about it.

pinterest.com would clean up another large chunk of crap

Anecdotally DuckDuckGo seems to have fewer sponsored sites than Google. DDG also makes it easy to block low-quality sites because it adds a data-domain attribute to the root of every search result. I recently started this mini uBlock Origin filter list for that (suggestions welcome!):<pre><code> ! Hide low-quality results on DuckDuckGo
 duckduckgo.com##[data-domain=&quot;w3schools.com&quot;]
 duckduckgo.com##[data-domain$=&quot;.w3schools.com&quot;]
 duckduckgo.com##[data-domain=&quot;w3schools.in&quot;]
 duckduckgo.com##[data-domain$=&quot;.w3schools.in&quot;]
 duckduckgo.com##[data-domain=&quot;download.cnet.com&quot;]
 !! Stack Exchange mirrors
 duckduckgo.com##[data-domain=&quot;exceptionshub.com&quot;]
 duckduckgo.com##[data-domain=&quot;intellipaat.com&quot;]</code></pre>

It&#x27;s so easy to do better!  Just look at what a rousing success Cuil was.

I still think that the &quot;Yahoo!&quot; style web directory is a good model. A catalogue of hand-curated links has increasing value as the quality of Google results goes down.I was briefly going to write &quot;I&#x27;m surprised that DMOZ[1] still exists&quot; but it says &quot;Copyright 2017 AOL&quot; at the bottom so maybe it doesn&#x27;t.Edit: ...and using the search box results in a 404 so I guess it&#x27;s really dead huh.Edit 2: Apparently this is the successor! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;curlie.org&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;curlie.org&#x2F;en</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dmoz-odp.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dmoz-odp.org</a>

The irony being that 20 (more like 25?) years Yahoo search was ripe for disruption... by Google :)Halt and Catch Fire [1] (As a nerd, I can say it&#x27;s one of the few TV series that got the hackers spirit correctly) had a few episodes about the Google disruption.Like some people often say here, things come and go in circles...[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...</a>

Neeva.comI am in the pre-release program. The hardest initial thing to get used to was not immediately scrolling down to the bottom to avoid all of the spam.I suspect that their methods are not much different than Google, but the experience has been so much better.

Google Search is ripe for disruption. It&#x27;s been over 20 years now and they are not dynamic or interesting at all anymore.

I&#x27;m amazed that there isn&#x27;t anything like uBlock Origin for search results.

I wish i could have 2010 google search as a alternative to 2021 google search.

I appreciate a lot of what you&#x27;re saying in this comment but I disagree with this sentiment:&gt; not the Ads - that&#x27;s fineIn my strongly held opinion, push advertising is not fine and it&#x27;s the root cause of all the problems you are discussing. We will only exit this mess that the web has become when everyone blocks push advertising by default. People should only see advertising when they are interested in being advertised to, e.g. sites you consciously choose to go to that advertise products &amp; services, like the old Yellow Pages phonebooks.

Comparing Google now to Alta Vista is not very helpful. They don&#x27;t get to rest on their laurels. Search is less helpful now, and it&#x27;s not clear to me that they care enough to do something about it.

I don’t think Google is the cesspool, I think Google is a search engine for an internet that is the cesspool.We’re moving to the vision of information services that were pioneered by AOL, Prodigy, etc. Honestly, we’re there already.

&quot;Google has turned into a cesspool.&quot;That&#x27;s a bit harsh but I agree that it is starting to fail to live up to the expectations I had with Google when it came out and destroyed Altavista in a spectacular shower of sparks.Could I tender: &quot;uBlacklist&quot; as a stop gap, amongst others as we await Google being given a right old kicking?Despite being a staunch Arch Linux user I have to deal with rather a lot of MS Windows related stuff. Being able to filter out that bloody awful Microsoft Social thing gets me closer to decent results. The majority of the next 10-100 results will be CnP clones of someone&#x27;s blog but a human is able to get in reasonably quickly. I&#x27;m toying with blocking Stackoverflow and other cough slatwarts to see if results get better for me.In my opinion: the www has hit a crossroads or perhaps a Spaghetti Junction or a Magic Roundabout for the last five years or so and continuing. However the exits are connected to the entrances on these road systems (take a look at them - they are real junctions. The MR is particularly terrifying but it works really well.)I still won&#x27;t use words like cesspool for this but I am increasingly losing my patience over the standard of results from Google. Those featured things (not the Ads - that&#x27;s fine) at the top which add #blah_blah to the URL to colour search terms yellow is not working for me. The quality of the returns featured in a box are often rubbish too. It would be nice to be able to turn all that stuff off.I understand that Google are trying to &quot;be&quot; the internet to try and keep the stock ticker pointing north but there seems to be a point when they have overreached themselves and I think that was passed several years ago. I also increasingly feel that Google thinks that it knows best and has removed many choices from their various UIs - that comes across as a bit arrogant.Many years ago I left Altavista behind for Google. I will move again if I feel I have to. Of course that&#x27;s not much in the grand scheme of things and I&#x27;ll probably only take around 100,000 people with me but they have friends - still probably not a big deal.

Google, to justify its huge capital worth, should deal with that crap.  Why else bother?

I don’t like google and don’t really want to defend it, but this is more of a lots of crappy websites problem than a google problem.

I wish duckduckgo had better results. google still better

dont forget adding quotes to things to stop the random &quot;did you mean to spell this?&quot; crapbasically, like everything in modernity, its a race to the bottom of the infinite dullards of popular

I can&#x27;t remember the last time I searched on Google without appending &quot;reddit&quot; to the end.

Hmn. I would agree about all crap being mixed in there, but in terms of overall results (both wrt. SEO crap and other irrelevant stuff), my experience has been that the quality troughed something like 2-3 years ago and then came back (my guess is that they&#x27;re incorporating all of the AI they&#x27;ve been doing throughout the company into search). To me it feels like it&#x27;s about 80% of its best right now.I bet it&#x27;s that we do different types of searches.

I wouldn&#x27;t call that rational. There is no reason you can&#x27;t apply human weighting on top of ML.Honestly, I don&#x27;t believe for a minute they &quot;can&#x27;t fix it.&quot; They do this sort of thing all the time, for instance when ML shows dark skinned people for a search for gorilla, they obviously have recourse.

My impression is that the ML algorithms at Google have the goal of increasing profitability from search. If that is the case, the quality of search will tend to be secondary to displaying pages that bring more revenue.

&quot;Request manual review of search results&quot; button?

Blatantly false that Google has &quot;no recourse&quot;, Google can put on penalty and bring domains down.

&gt; G can&#x27;t fix it.Yes, they can. They should simply stop measuring only positives, and start measuring negatives - e.g. people that press the back button of their browser, or click the second, third, fourth result afterwards...which should hint the ML classifiers that the first result was total crap in the first place.But I guess this is exactly what happens if you have a business model where leads to sites where you provide ads give you a weird ethics, as your company profits from those scammers more than from legit websites.From an ML point of view google&#x27;s search results are the perfect example of overfitting. Kinda ironic that they lead the data science research field and don&#x27;t realize this in their own product, but teach this flaw everywhere.

The reason for that is actually rational: when Amit Singhal was in charge the search rules were written by hand. Once he was fired, the Search Quality team switched to machine learning. The ML was better in many ways: it produced higher quality results with a lot less effort. It just had one possibly fatal flaw: if some result was wrong there was no recourse. And that&#x27;s what you are observing now: search quality is good or excellent most of the time while sometimes it&#x27;s very bad and G can&#x27;t fix it.

&gt; Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .govA great opportunity for students and public servants to sell premium URLs.

Google is a cesspool because the spammers and SEO-hackers are in full force, and Google is only reactive to these threats these days. I mean, does it really matter if they are making hundreds of billions of dollars a year? They seem to be doing something right.The only time something will change is when traffic starts decreasing to their site, but it&#x27;s good enough such that people won&#x27;t change. Look at Facebook, I don&#x27;t know anyone who uses it as much as they used to 10 years ago, but it&#x27;s making the most money it ever has. Why on earth would any behavior change? From their points of view, everyone is happy with it!

I also noticed that Apple users see way more fake online shop results than Linux users, from the same IP, with regularly cleared browser cache and identical search terms.Those fake shops are part of discussions in politics right now. Usually they&#x27;re registered in Ireland or Malta as companies due to their specific banking laws. They make millions with those scams and people can&#x27;t differ between legit online shops and fake ones - because the legit ones actually look crappier than the fake ones when it comes to the website designs.In Germany, we have at least for hardware the &quot;geizhals&quot; website which is kind of an index for all kinds of electronics shops and they try to verify as much as possible.But for other online shop sectors (e.g. clothing or home stuff) I wouldn&#x27;t trust anything. Even on Amazon I got scammed a lot and heard absurd things from others...like getting packages with no content in them and Amazon refusing to see that the seller is a scammer etc.

Same story for various Wordpress plugins and widgety things that live in site footers.Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new &quot;articles&quot; that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.

That is true! Why should google do something? They say &quot;use ads&quot;, to make money.Use other search engines is the only way to do something.

They have no competition to care anymore. Their closest competitor, Bing, has a 2.24% market share which consists mostly of people who don&#x27;t bother to change their default browser&#x27;s default search engine. Competition is necessary to breed innovation. See for example, IE6.

I’ve always wondered if Google AdWords hurts your SEO.  Let’s say you sell widgets and searching for widgets you are ranked 5.  You buy AdWords to be on the top.  Since people click you AdWords ad that’s on top, they are less likely to click the organic listing thus penalizing your organic listing since it’s not getting clicks.  Google factors in which organic listing click counts when determining ranking since it is a strong signal.

&quot;SEO scammers got you down? Call Google Ads now!&quot;

Yes they would have. OMG that was 10 years ago and ...what is new in Google search these last 10 years. Maybe a lot but I don&#x27;t see it. I just see ads and, when I do some long tail query most of the results are just random sites in russia or whatever with keyword salad (is there a word for that kind of site?)

The old Google would have hunted these down mercilessly (Panda update in 2011). What happened to Google these days?

This is a valid question. Though, I would argue in this case that they have found a loophole more than anything, if they are not in violation of the TOS.As others have pointed out and the author acknowledges, he is technically injecting links when his users embed their scoreboard on their website through an auto-included link-back to his site.Now, I don&#x27;t frown upon this. It is not deceptive and its placement is more than relevant.The same cannot be said for the scheme the author uncovered. But whether it is violating Google&#x27;s TOS is another question. I&#x27;m not sure of the answer.

While I think this is extremely shady and will avoid ever using a tool like this in the future, does it actually break google&#x27;s TOS? It seems like a valid defense could be made.

I find it even funnier that it appears in a research paper:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchsquare.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;rs-8615&#x2F;v1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchsquare.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;rs-8615&#x2F;v1</a>(It&#x27;s on page 24, at the bottom of the References section.)

I find it hilarious that this made it&#x27;s way into an Amazon listing for some waterproofing chemical. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210607233655&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Star-Brite-81900-Fabric-Waterproofing&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B01FI61GFS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210607233655&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazo...</a>

It&#x27;s even freaking funny that &quot;SEO&quot; appears as a Related search at the bottom of that search url. It has nothing to do other than a lot of people (we) come from a SEO article

This is clever!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=%22Learn+how+to+solve+a+Rubix+Cube+with+the+beginner+method%22" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=%22Learn+how+to+solve+a+Rubi...</a>

&gt; Now if you are feeling very magnanimous, you could argue that the editor is a freemium tool, and that added links are how you pay for the free version.This unknown exchange of value for “free” products and services is what everyone from Facebook and Google down to malware-like browser extensions do to extract difficult-to-acquire resources.People don’t understand how their personal data, internet connection (residential proxy network node), or in this case, publicly displayed website are being monetized or used indirectly for monetization.People don’t know or are tricked into allowing themselves or their resources to serve as an ugly cost externality to some other clean-looking business endeavor.

&gt; Now if you are feeling very magnanimous, you could argue that the editor is a freemium tool, and that added links are how you pay for the free version.Well, unfortunately this is basically how every freemium tool works. They have some way of advertising, in exchange for free use of the tool.Even reputable CMS tools like WordPress include back links to wordpress on a new site and themes.Although, this is much less common with open-source free tools, as the community resists these kinds of changes.No such thing as a free lunch!

I wonder how many similar tools are also like this. We can&#x27;t trust search engines anymore.

Keep trying, it seems to only do it some times. I’ve used them and am always checking my code and have seen it a few times.Maybe clear cookies and try from a diffferbroawer?

SomInjust tried one of these sites - and I cannot reproduce the scam - my output from htmltidy.net seems to work fine and I cannot find any weird back links.Any notes on how to reproduce?

usps.com wasn&#x27;t on the fp eitherpostofficelocations.com, postofficehours.com, yelp, postallocations, etc.

The United States Post Office in Local Town USA is a great place to buy stamps. Find out about Local Town USA mail service here at randomlocaltownmailservice dot com.

I searched for my local USPS store today.  Every result was some SEO crap.   No usps.gov result on the first page.

Similar to “my ip address” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27415897" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27415897</a>.Google just seems to give way too much weight to domain name matches with the search keyword.

The thing is, I have a site in a very competitive niche that&#x27;s full of black hat SEO tactics, and I am doing my white hat best hoping that Google tanks these sites when they update algos over time, and I&#x27;d then be the best placed to take their spots over.But in the meantime, yep... It sucks.

Yep this! How can you really beat SEO when people can just try new things all day and see if it helps their rankings? I don&#x27;t feel there&#x27;s a solution here. Everyone suffers under SEO types just trying to bring scammy things to the top of the results page.

It&#x27;s worth noting the scam site is the top result in Bing and DuckDuckGo as well

Same story for chrome a while back. I formatted my father computer because he had a bunch of malware. The first thing he did was to google “chrome” and download the first result. Which was an ads. Which was a malware.

I don&#x27;t think there are incentives for a change. The way it is done now is probably more profitable and the competition is doing exactly the same.

That is certainly eye opening and it&#x27;s really amazing news. Hopefully in future the rankings could be fairly decided on usefulness and merit than who can buy or trick the most links.Anyway so how would you explain the rankings of sites in this article? I thought all that was going for these guys were just the insane amount of links pointing to their site.

Like the backlink spammers on the article, which are winning?but yea &quot;narrative&quot;

Interesting, but this does not seem to match empirical evidence by the likes of Ahrefs, which suggests that links are by far the most important ranking factor.

Backlinks are not as important as Google would have you think, they are a pretty weak ranking factor except in the deep tail of the web.Google (and others) keep up the narrative that they&#x27;re important so that black and grey hat SEO folks keep focusing effort in the wrong places.Source: ran the web spam detection team on a different well known search engine

If you think about it, these are the &quot;money searches&quot;. It&#x27;s crazy they didn&#x27;t try harder to solve people&#x27;s needs  instead of regurgitating that careless spam.

Heh, I struggle figure out what is a real review and what is a paid for ad. It&#x27;s sad to the point where I&#x27;ve pretty much given up because of the sheer amount of time it would take to do the research. Instead I opt to go for Amazon&#x27;s competitors (e.g. Currys and Argos for us in the UK) and pick something there. They&#x27;re a little more vetted, and less likely to be knock off or something.

&gt;Most sites which have these &quot;list of 10 XYZ&quot; are just similar money making scams yet they rank so highly on Google.I was just talking to my SO about this the other day when we were trying to find an air purifier for allergies. I&#x27;m the kind of person that likes to compare products a ton before dropping more than about ~$100 on anything. The way the internet has become in the last 10-15 years has made this increasingly more difficult. You really have to dig to find in-depth unbiased content on anything someone stands to make money from. For every 1 good review there are 100 &#x27;top 10 best ranked&#x27; blogspam sites..

Google really needs to come up with a better way than backlinks to rank sites.It&#x27;s 2021 and surprisingly for all the billion dollar A.I. it can still be gamed with a bunch of unrelated links with little or no connection from the article to the site.Also it&#x27;s pretty unnatural and shady to get these backlinks. For my own SaaS site almost every blogger I contacted for a review just straight up asked me money in exchange for link. What the software did was of no consequence to this exchange. Most sites which have these &quot;list of 10 XYZ&quot; are just similar money making scams yet they rank so highly on Google.P.S. And likewise I too get dozens of emails daily with &quot;offers&quot; from free article to actual dollar amounts just for putting a paid link. These SEO guys are just relentless because such shenanigans are working great at beating Google so far.

Plus google returns results that link to shit like <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;edva.implantologiadentalecroazia.it&#x2F;somewhat-related-to-your-search.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;edva.implantologiadentalecroazia.it&#x2F;somewhat-related-...</a>And then you get re-direct to some prize-winning spam site.I love getting a search result that includes Google Books because those are usually useful. That’s what Google was best at, bringing in things that weren’t regular web pages.

Don’t the kids say nowadays first link on google always sus

If you&#x27;re using google to find adequate tools, you&#x27;re searching the wrong place. Wikipedia (even stack overflow) seems way better and has curated lists of open source tools for a particular purpose. Of course, wikipedia can be edited but IME, it is way better than google to find adequate tools.If you&#x27;re decided on googling for a suggestion of a tool, at least include &quot;open source&quot;. Even if you&#x27;re searching for proprietary tools, you&#x27;ll probably find the traditional &quot;it has better X, Y, compared to proprietary tool W&quot; review.

I think that’s somewhat the promise of Web 3.0 at this point. Painful to use and relatively empty. However, it’s mostly people hyping random crypto instead of actually creating value.

No great fan of Google, but a large component of the problem is the Library of Babel phenomenon: there’s just too much crap being published.Let’s face it... the early internet was interesting because the only people who could use it (and publish on it) were smart eccentrics. That was its charm. 
The technological hurdle served as the curator: you might have been a crazy white supremacist, anarchist, conspiracy theorist, or ‘expert’ in how to grow radishes or some other bizarrely eclectic field... but all of them were necessarily a bit smarter than the average bear just by virtue of knowing how to host content and access it; not a trivial task in the late 90’s.Maybe it’s time to think up some convoluted alternate network that is a royal pain-in-the-ass to use. Perhaps there the eclectic and useful content creators will once again arise (and searching their trove will be a snap as most everything there will be fresh, unique, and interesting.) It will exist, I suppose, for a few years before tools are made to enable grandma to easily use it.

While Google still has market dominance, I wonder if privacy-centric search engines will be the future. I am considering putting substantial effort towards such a goal, you can sign up to learn about when at puubl.com [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.puubl.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.puubl.com&#x2F;</a>

ive learned that almost any keyword related to sale-able products has been gamed on Google. all i see are affiliate links and people that keep track of which format to build their website in, that google likes this week.more importantly, what ive also learned is that Bing search results are less of an affiliate link cesspool because fewer SEO spammers are working at gaming Bing&#x27;s results.

The problem with an algorithm, you can find ways to game the algorithm.

He&#x27;s probably selling that service on blackhatworld

[Disclosure work at Google]
Unless i&#x27;m misreading this, the publisher of the html editor can easily replace links on some pretty large websites. Then it can also hack Google to remain a top html editor. This is a very clever virus!

&gt; The creators of Scorecounter also made an online HTML editorOr paid the entity running the malware HTML editor. It&#x27;s probably injecting links to a variety of sites who paid them for placement.

Circa 1999 I was running a webdesing studio. We added that link to all the websites we designed, then the next logical step was to make it link to a page with our entire portfolio which in turn linked to our website. That boosted the SEO of all our customers, and in turn boosted ours exponentially.

It probably started with the guy adding something like &quot;Edited using XXXX Editor tool&quot; to make himself some publicity. Seeing that it worked he started selling those backlinks a fortune.

Honestly kind of a brilliant SEO strategy. Makes me nervous to use any free online tool

&gt;Some highly-ranked online tools for editing or “cleaning” HTML seem to be secretly injecting links into their output to push themselves and affiliated sites up the search engine rankings.You can&#x27;t pretend this isn&#x27;t funny as fuck lol.

Embarrassing but understandable. Computer security isn&#x27;t about perfection, which is impossible. It&#x27;s about vigilance, resilience, backups, and responding quickly. I&#x27;d say they nailed it, here.

&gt; and my personal favorite: a blog post on Kaspersky.comWow, embarrassing for Kaspersky as a computer security focused site to be a victim of this.When I searched for &quot;Rubiks&quot; as it said to do, I couldn&#x27;t find it though. Has the Kaspersky post been changed?

Can you provide an example of terrible reference in W3Schools?

Imagine my surprise to find that the scammy site at the top of searches isn&#x27;t w3cschools - that cesspool of terrible references.Once I discovered that everything I would ever need was better explained on the MDN my life as a webdeveloper strongly improved.

You should report this to google, its clearly a huge violation of terms of service.

I know. But I&#x27;d rather shoot myself in the foot than use AMP.

Just an observation: your competitor site is using AMP pages,* while you don&#x27;t appear to be. I suspect without knowing that Google take this into account in ranking.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Accelerated_Mobile_Pages" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Accelerated_Mobile_Pages</a>* forgive my RAS syndrome

That is great, but can google change their algo to some point where it works differently? Their ad business is there in the web.

True to some extent but it is improving with Google updates. Now, there is a way to go still, and some legit websites get hit by updates unfortunately, but overall fewer and fewer scams pass through.SEO used to be extremely gameable (seniority of site, keyword stuffing, backlinks), but these levers aren&#x27;t as obvious now, if at all.

&gt; Then it&#x27;s followed by wall of text made of keywords.I&#x27;ve noticed a rise of that as well. With some searches such spam is all I&#x27;ve received. But that&#x27;s really a problem in all languages Google supports I think.There&#x27;s even malware that infects websites and generates such content, not sure what&#x27;s the point of that. Anyone knows?

&gt; It&#x27;s not like you are going to switch to BingFrom personal experience, I switched to another tool (DDG) a couple of years ago. When I occasionally try Google, for 95% of common requests I&#x27;m appalled by the results: the top is only SEO garbage. For very specific and precise searches (where people are not trying to game the system), Google is still the best, though.

&gt; It&#x27;s not like you are going to switch to Bing?I changed the default search engine from Google to Bing and DDG in all browsers. Google does have better results, so sometimes I still need to use them. But for 90% of generic queries such as the weather, product information, or finding a company&#x27;s website, Bing is good enough.

I&#x27;ve not seen it for opening times (UK here) but the same pattern is very visible elsewhere.Entertainment&#x2F;news sites are chock full of pages like &quot;&lt;whatever&gt;, what we know so far, release date, cast, will it be renewed, has it been cancelled...&quot; pages that spend many paragraphs saying &quot;we know nothing, randomly plucking crap out of thin air we could guess something-or-other but that remains to be confirmed&quot;. A new news story, film, show, or even just a hint of something, and the pages go up to try capture early clicks. Irritatingly they are often not updated quickly when real information becomes available or that information changes (particularly over the last year that has affected release dates). I have several sites DNS blocked because that annoys me less than getting one of these useless&#x2F;out-of-date pages more often than not when I follow one of their links.

If you Google stuff like &quot;opening hours of ...&quot; in Turkish(probably in other languages too), since many years the search results are only news websites spamming google, including the Turkish franchise of CNN, the CNN Turk.The format goes like this: Lately people are searching for XYZ but is it safe to search for XYZ? What experts say for XYZ? To find out continue to read our article.Then it&#x27;s followed by wall of text made of keywords(in sentences that don&#x27;t make sense), if you are lucky there would be the opening hours(which are often not accurate) somewhere down the text.But that doesn&#x27;t stop there. Even actual news articles are written for the consumption of the Google bot, the sentences often don&#x27;t make sence, they are repeated multiple times with the synonyms of one of the words, making it into a lengthy article that doesn&#x27;t have any meat beyond the title.I argue that the problem is not SEO experts with low ethics, the problem is the way the business is structured. SEO experts don&#x27;t do it for the sake of the art but because they are paid to do it. They are paid to do it because it has a positive ROI on bringing eyeballs and people pay Google for eyeballs, then Google pays those who generate the eyeballs.Isn&#x27;t it better for Google and everyone involved if you can&#x27;t find what you are looking for, continuing your search brings more eyeballs? It&#x27;s not like you are going to switch to Bing? You are also not going to abandon the internet and go to a library.

This is not how it generally works, I would say. It is more about how much you pay Google and how good your page is. I worked with several SEO experts and none of them suggested scams like this. The risk of doing something like this is too high for many companies.

The useful thing would instantly become useless because people would start gaming it.

It&#x27;s also so frustrating to get results for websites which present themselves in the search results with &quot;Results for &lt;your query&gt;&quot;...only to show &quot;no results found&quot; when you actually click on them.Good thing &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts has no size limit.

I still do this but I&#x27;m 99% sure Google and DDG max out at around 3 keywords these days. I just get results for the top 3 SEO keywords, no matter how much I try to refine my search.Maybe it&#x27;s just because I&#x27;m searching for technical stuff but DDG and Google are both a big source of frustration for me,DDG thinks I mistype most of my queries and will desperately try to correct my &#x27;mistake&#x27; because &quot;surely nobody is really searching for documentation about ARM32 bootloaders, they just mistyped when they were really trying to look for a webshop that sells 32 different ARMchairs and ARMy boots.&quot;.Google will understand my input at least half of the time but uses that power to show me the power of websites that do some article&#x2F;keyword scraping and run GPT on it, or this great new Medium blogpost with two paragraphs of someone copying a Wikipedia summary of what ARM is and copy pasting build instructions from a GitHub README.I&#x27;ve tried searching github.com itself but that&#x27;s just a nice way to find out that apparently most of the data they store is just scraped websites, input for ML models or dictionaries and they will happily show me all 9K forks of the one repo that contains the highest density of these keywords.&#x2F;rant

That&#x27;s why for certain things Google is useless. Have to add certain keywords to avoid the SEO content to get comparisons, reviews, forums.One day Google may introduce multiple search rankings, where one of them is SEO and another is the &quot;useful things&quot;. But I don&#x27;t hold my breath.

I&#x27;m trying alternative search engines from time to time and and they are much weaker than Google. So yeah, I&#x27;d bet on them to improve stage. The others first need to catch up.

If a topic or search term is present in any form of news article (If one paper has them, they all have them shortly after), the search results are just extremely bad. You know that Google promotes its media friends and by now Google results look like an ad list. They haven&#x27;t stopped innovating, they are moving backwards.It would need an option to ignore any form of news media in search results.

Fix the system? People who comment online seem to think the concept of the &quot;search engine&quot; cannot be improved, except by Google. The list of inactive search engines at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Search_engine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Search_engine</a> is depressing. The problem for us is that the supposed innovator Google has little financial incentive to improve the system regarding &quot;content&quot; or &quot;quality&quot;. As long as the traffic keeps coming, the ad revenue keeps coming. Their best bet is promote what&#x27;s &quot;popular&quot; (&quot;top-ranking&quot;). Because the traffic keeps coming no matter what Google does, &quot;content&quot; and &quot;quality&quot; are not really their major concerns. There are no true alternatives for users. Bing is basically a Google clone. No new ideas. Other search engines, like DDG, just piggyback off Google or Bing crawlers. Not sure about Baidu, Yandex or others but I suspect they are more or less Google clones as well. In every case, advertising dictates design. No new ideas.

Getting stuff on PagaRank feels a game. Getting stuff out of Google feels a game too. To the point that moving to an alternative feels worth it, at least to try.

Everyone wonders about that. Googling most phone numbers return nothing but pages of spam links.A decade from now, Google will have made no improvement.

I wonder why google is not more rigorous about that. Google search is riddled since years with &quot;optimized&quot; content nobody wants. It&#x27;s become so bad even my non-techie friends are beginning to switch to DuckDuckGo -- which is not better per se (probably worse at contextualizig).

Or .... how much money you pay Google. This is working as intended for a free search engine.

SEO is so broken, it&#x27;s not about website content or website quality. It&#x27;s about how much money you pay to some punks - &quot;SEO experts&quot; who are hacking a system. I&#x27;m so sick of that.

Begin to make your own content and make it public... Oh, like a blog. Like in the old days.

Well, yes, because googlebot is the gatekeeper of popularity and income for websites. Got to appease the decision maker.

On the contrary, the Web, being a hypertext system, was definitely always about discovering content. If you found an interesting website, it would typically link to other interesting sites. There used to be ways to systematize these ad-hoc linkings, such as Web rings. And the first attempts to catalogue and categorize the contents of the (then tiny) Web were in the form of human-curated directories à la Yahoo. It’s just that in just a few years it became apparent that this approach could not scale, and search engines based on automatic crawlers became the norm – but again, critically, these too are of course fundamentally dependent on the Web’s discoverability by following hyperlinks!

The problem is, is that the internet at its conception was just a way to host content, not a way to discover content. When discovery was done via word of mouth or extra-internet means, the websites themselves were just for the people that viewed them.Now, when the website needs to not only contain content, but also be its own advertisement, writing it in a way that will maximize virality is the natural course of action to make sure the site actually gets seen.This will likely be true until a method of finding webpages that is not based on automated scraping or the page itself.

Even (or rather, especially) if every SEO advice is correct, it still means that Google effectively has a lot of control over the shape of the modern web, alone through indirect pressure via SEO.

I am running every SEO advise as an experiment before implementing it across my network and a lot of advise actually brings results.

It is cargo cult but it&#x27;s cargo cult because it is the way to &quot;success&quot;. Company A have great page ranking, and blog about how they think they got there. Company B also have great page ranking, but think they did something different to Company A, so they blog about it, too. Everyone else reads both blogs and intersects what both companies did, and implement those changes. Iterate for every difference you encounter and voila.. you now have your rubber stamp SEO method.

Much of it driven by cult cargo SEO, throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the page in completely unproven hope that it&#x27;ll somehow game the rankings

&gt; Some of the technical SEO is good though, like simply making the page crawlable and content being in a logical order.Semantic HTML has been created to help screen readers and browsers understand content organization, it having been hijacked by SE is just a side-effect.

Yes, but even for those, it means that we are left to hope that what&#x27;s good for a crawler and what&#x27;s good for e.g. a screen-reader will still align in the future. Right now it feels almost coincidental.

Some of the technical SEO is good though, like simply making the page crawlable and content being in a logical order.The &quot;fiddle with H1&quot; or &quot;write X amount of words&quot; or &quot;buy Y number of links with a % of anchor text&quot; is silly.

That sounds...like a great reason not to get into &quot;mobile&quot; dev and stick to PWAs.

As a mobile developer (sometimes) I rarely&#x2F;never see apps that don&#x27;t have Google SDKs bundled either..

On the other hand, Google over the years has tweaked their algorithms and recommendations to match up with what makes a good site, in terms of content and markup.

I didn&#x27;t check but to my recollection that domain is pretty old, domain age is supposed to be a principle metric for trust (which in turn is a strong signal for page rank). So, ...I mean it&#x27;s pretty reasonable, if a site has been around a long time it&#x27;s going to be generally &#x27;good&#x27;.

I know that it&#x27;s being done, but I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s necessary. I frequently find good old unstyled HTML pages from the 90&#x27;s internet (the ones with Prev&#x2F;Next&#x2F;Up links, like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tldp.org&#x2F;LDP&#x2F;abs&#x2F;html&#x2F;here-docs.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tldp.org&#x2F;LDP&#x2F;abs&#x2F;html&#x2F;here-docs.html</a>) at the top of Google results.

Apart from stuffing 200 links in the footer why is this bad?

Extremely useful for when a link dies and there is no useful archive.

Human readable Urls don&#x27;t sound that bad.

Fortunately with GPT3 and the like I’d imagine this approach will soon have had its day. Not that I’m optimistic about whatever will replace it.

It never seemed important to the CEO of a previous company I worked for that we had something to say, only that we gave off the impression that we had something to say. We hired an outsourced blog writing service to fill our wordpress instance with generic, inoffensive platitudes and listicles poorly cribbed from Wikipedia and the ONS. Squint a little bit and you could convince yourself there was value to it, but nobody with any experience in the problem space would treat it as anything more than marketing fluff. His hope was always that one day we would get rewarded by the great Google algorithm and appear on the first page for search terms we were convinced our users were looking for, but the end result was that our blog was largely designed to be read by robots.It&#x27;s the same thing as the tweaks you have to perform for SEO optimisation, some have questionable value to the end user but you jump through the hoops anyway because it&#x27;s what is done, by pleasing the robots you&#x27;re rewarded with a higher search position.

worse: paid content farms &#x2F; ai to generate crap &quot;articles&quot; by the boatload, targeting every organic search term 5 different ways.The result is that ACTUALLY USEFUL articles are buried on page 5. Any slightly helpful bit of content in the top articles are repeated (using different grammar of course) in all the other &quot;top&quot; articles.

What I tell every client is that 90% of SEO is in writing good, relevant content. Technical SEO is more like housekeeping. Adding footer links is redundant if you have a sitemap and good navigation. If your users can find stuff easily, crawlers can too. The biggest technical things that I make a stink over are canonical URLs and https.

As webdeveloper I have a strong feeling that we are writing web for google bot and not for people. For any website I created I have a list from SEO what to add. Like 200 links at each page bottom, different titles, headers, metas, human readable urls without query params, all that canonical urls, nofollow rules etc. Most of this things invisible to users and created only for googlebot.

To be fair, this is how the web has changed too. High-value content has been duplicated and hidden behind pay walls when in the early days (ie my early days on the internet&#x2F;web) everyone seemed to come with their own content and share freely.

Yes, and what I always wonder about is that while I can understand the crappy sites that want money for an otherwise freely available documentation, I cannot understand the reason behind those sites (they are not only related to electronics) that come up in search (as they do have the very specific keyword&#x2F;part number searched for) only to say &quot;Sorry we don&#x27;t have any of these, nor anything related&quot;.

This: As an electronic engineer I would often search for component data sheets. Usually the sheet I wanted would be the first hit. These days however I get pages and pages of crap sites that want to sell me the data sheet. Or even pages that say that they don&#x27;t actually have it.

Google is getting worse and worse. It&#x27;s harder than ever to find real information. All you get is seo scams trying to lour you in and sell you stuff. It&#x27;s tragic. I miss the old internet.

Ok, that&#x27;s ultra-smart. Something you would think &quot;how come I never thought of that?&quot;

google search is garbage, that&#x27;s it.We had a compititor who spams his page full with SEO garbage Words, our Software is used 100 times more than his software, more people search for our software, click it and use it, link it, but who is on 1st place in search results? Right, the SEO spammer, with the slower page, full of shiny SEO words that has nothing todo with the software.@google i wait for working AI that detects such garbage sites!

but, in your example, the context is &quot;news&quot; and both examples that you have provided do fall into that context.

Are non-sequiturs always malicious? For example, suppose you have a news site, and it has a story about Ukraine, followed by a story about school shootings. Even if two links next to one another are unrelated, that doesn&#x27;t prove that they&#x27;re not genuine.

What I don&#x27;t understand is why does Google continue to use metrics that are so easy to fake and game.Surely some kind of fairly trivial NN&#x2F;Not very deep learning system can classify HTML content so that out of context links (like &quot;Learn how to solve a Rubic Cube&quot; in a Seventh Day Adventists sabbath lesson) and content that is copied is ignored or marked down.Whilst I&#x27;m sure GPT-3 could be used to create more realistic looking fake content - this would eliminate 99% of the script kiddies creating low value SEO spamming sites.

&gt;first major eventIIRC with PageRank there were very specific values associated with &#x27;toolbar PageRank&#x27;, e.g. a PR7 link could be sold for $1K a month. Understandable because at that time there was no context to PageRank at all, it was simply about being linked to by an &quot;authority&quot;. This was 20 years ago though.

This is apropos...Google&#x27;s old link-based authority algorithm, pagerank, isn&#x27;t alaysing the same web anymore. I think there&#x27;s barely any signal in links these days.The first major event was Google itself. Once you use something as a metric, it becomes currency. SEO vs anti-spam became a defining cat and mouse game. This kind of stuff was born then, and antispam was meant to curb it.The second major event was user generated content. The old link pages and blogrolls die slowly. Comments, twitter, and such become the way links are shared. High signal, but extremely spam prone. Google tapped out of this early, and mostly ignore user generated content.The third major event is facebook, and facebook like ways of doing things. This made most regular people&#x27;s content unindexable. Search for esoteric keywords used to return a lot of forum results. Still does, to an extent. The thread is usually years, or decades old. What&#x27;s left on the open web is a subset, a non random subset.Wikipedia is one of the last sites that does &quot;hypertext&quot; the way pagerank assumes the web works.In any case, I feel like search (or what search used to be) is in decline. There isn&#x27;t as much web to search anymore, in a sense. The broad brush way of doing antispam (eg user generated content is just ignored) makes more sense. Why deal with all that noise&#x2F;spam, just to search what&#x27;s left of the old web.What&#x27;s left? User behaviour, a la analytics. That&#x27;s makes for more feedback loops and winner takes most dynamics. Localisation became localisation to your bubble. Meanwhile &quot;officialness&quot; measures aren&#x27;t against google&#x27;s ethic&#x2F;aesthetic anymore. They got burned by the &quot;fake news^&quot; crisis, and the quick fix was officialness. In for a penny. In for a pound.Meanwhile, web search is increasingly just another thing that google search does. It searches &quot;your&quot; data, content of your devices, search history and NN generated whatnot. It searches news, ads, returns answers to questions, does math... There&#x27;s nothing new about seo scams, antispam just isn&#x27;t Google&#x27;s primary solution anymore. Just default to other ways of returning results.I&#x27;m calling it. Web search is dead. Long live the new websearch.^Circa 2015 usage, not the current

The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam