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Personally I believe this is only fair, because such websites are abusing the inner workings of Google's crawler while displaying to users something else that t
by bad_user 11y ago
Personally I believe this is only fair, because such websites are abusing the inner workings of Google's crawler while displaying to users something else that the crawler doesn't see. I always wondered why such tactics aren't penalized, such as websites placed behind a paywall by means of Javascript, like the Experts-Exchange of old or these websites that show slimy full page ads, sometimes with broken links. And don't get me wrong, I'm actually for paywalls and ads, I'm fine with whatever business model can keep the lights on, but then if you want web-scale traffic, it's not morally justifiable to piggyback on the open-web. If you want to sell your slimy app, then use an app store instead of tricking a web search engine.
Also, Google's search engine has never, ever, ever been objective in the signals used for ranking. Their results have been different and biased ever since the start, which is what made their search engine successful in the first place. It's a little late to complain about that.
- vacri 11y agoThere was a time when the circumvention for the Experts-Exchange paywall was "scroll down a bit" - the data had to be visible to the googlebot, and they made it look obscured at the top, but it was all there and readable a few 'pages' down.
- mattmanser 11y agoI happened to go through to my first result at the site with a dash in a year or two, it no longer does that. I wonder if they got penalised for doing it.
- LoSboccacc 11y agopeople were so fed up with their shenanigans to cheat seo that a whole new industry as been born out of it in the form of stack exchange