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Sometime around the housing market crash (though unrelated, I assume) Google seemed to give up on fighting spam sites and just harshly down-ranked anything that
by ashark 9y ago
Sometime around the housing market crash (though unrelated, I assume) Google seemed to give up on fighting spam sites and just harshly down-ranked anything that's wasn't an ultra-high-traffic site. A little while later (2010? 2011?) their search got much "smarter" and it became difficult to impossible to trick it into giving you less-popular results using well-crafted searches. A big (and very good!) chunk of the web became way less visible over that span of 2-3 years or so—and my impressive-even-to-other-developers Shaolin Google-Fu was defeated by Google's Tiger Style :-(
You can also see the ugly results of their new ranking system any time you search for a simple answer that deserves maybe two sentences, and are greeted with ten search results all of which are a dozen rambling, content-free paragraphs, with a title closely matching your search and with your answer buried somewhere inside (maybe). That reads as "high value" and "high relevance" so google eats it up, even though it's 100% grade-A garbage content.
- zo1 9y agoOne other thing I've noticed, and it's been happening for a few years. Is that somehow, magically, there are websites out there that have the exact combination of my search results in their title. Almost as if Google forwarded my search to some party which then went ahead and created a dummy "proxy-search" site with the exact heading, and whose body just contains their own results for the same search criteria I used.
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoI was recently wondering about the same and was also wondering how this can happen. Your proxy-search would be a solution but then I wonder what "indexing" would mean to Google
- alister 9y agoI've had this exact experience many times myself and I'm also at a loss to explain how it happens unless Google is (unintentionally) facilitating it. An observation I can add is that the dummy site may not appear on my first search for "very unlikely phrase". But if I keep tweaking my Google search, a dummy site that has "very unlikely phrase" as its title soon appears in the results.
- marcosdumay 9y agoIt shouldn't be too hard to make Google index all 3 words combinations from your site. I've inadvertently made them index every city location at my country once.