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Google Search is routinely gamed by private blog networks

354 points by whalabi 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Matsta 7y ago
I see the OP submitted this article. To be honest, PBN's are nowhere near as effective as they were a couple of years ago. The chance of getting a manual action against your site is a lot higher. If you were going to drop a few thousand dollars on buying backlinks, you don't want to have your site de-indexed by Google in 6 months without getting an ROI. Non-English versions of Google are more linens and are still easy to game for PBN's. Also, all PBN's are not all created equally. Making sure the domain isn't dropped, different whois details/domain registrars/hosting providers. Also putting relevant links to sites other than what clients have paid for to make this look more legitimate. Niches with big competition like Pharma/Gambling/Game Hacks/Lead Gen will continue to user PBN's, but bigger SEO's will be diversifying their link building portfolio by building more whitehat links like guest posts and then sending more questionable links like PBN's to them as a tier 2 backlink.
- fasicle 7y ago
  I wonder why non-English versions of Google are behind on this (I agree that they are), surely much of the Google search algorithm is language independent?
  - celeritascelery 7y ago
    I don’t see how it could be, language semantics and homographs are different everywhere. They must have to make adjustments.
    - fasicle 7y ago
      I agree they have to make adjustments, however factors such as number of backlinks from high DA sites, user dwell time on page, schema markup, meta data structure, https, domain age, mobile friendliness, page speed etc. don't require an understanding of language.
  - ma2rten 7y ago
    Probably because of manual anti-spam action.
  - sammyQc 7y ago
    Less data available in smaller market for the algorithms to work with, noise vs. signal ratio. And it’s a snow balling effect, they still need to provide results to users, and with more spammy websites in a market the average website can get away with more dodgy tactics.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  On that note, there's also a technique, forgot the name, but it's basically anti-SEO where they intentionally push a competitor's pages onto a PBN with the intent of getting it detected (and penalized) by Google.
  - liveoneggs 7y ago
    yeah then you get to play the disavow game
  - paulcole 7y ago
    Had a competitor do this to a site with a bunch of really weird porno links. Kept happening for months. I'd disavow them, 10x as many would show up weeks later. Eventually I lost interest fighting and just stopped disavowing them. There was never any penalty and from what I could tell the extra links actually helped our rankings! After about 18 months the links stopped. No clue what happened.
  - Matsta 7y ago
    It's called negative SEO. There was a Google update that is a bit more lenient so your competitors can't negatively spam your site. Unless your competitor had some serious dosh to mass spam your site on PBN's, they would most likely being using a tool like Xrumer or GSA where you can purchase a 100k backlink blast for as little as $5
    - dmix 7y ago
      Companies are actively engaging in negative SEO all the time too. My friend used to work at a shady SEO shop in Florida and they used it often. Their clients don’t seem to care how it gets there since they mostly pushing affiliate ads, not a sustainable long term business.
- jfoster 7y ago
  What you describe at the end isn't whitehat. Whitehat (according to Google, from what I can gather) is focusing on site experience and just ensuring search engines are facilitated in indexing.
  - Matsta 7y ago
    True, building any sort of backlinks are aganist Google's ToS. But that doesn't mean legitmate don't do it. You just need to be smart about it and make sure it looks "natural" to Google.
bhartzer 7y ago
They are not called “dropped domains”, the term used more often is “expired domains”. The author doesn’t even mention how registrars are a player and part of this, as they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are dropped. Google has done a lot since 2011 to identify pbns and take them down. This article seems a bit outdated.
- Matsta 7y ago
  Agreed. Also the forum he's referencing to is BlackHatWorld for those curious. It's well known that some of the sellers on there are artificially inflating their views and replies, and a few of the top sellers are probably using hacked logins to write reviews (their database was leaked a few years ago: https://hacked-emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhatworld-com/ https://hacked-emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhat...) For example, take a look at this thread: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/captain-jack-sparrow-2019-200-premium-foundation-linksdevil-circuit-rank-boostersummer-50-off.654231/page-362 https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/captain-jack-sparrow-2019-... Thousands of replies that all sound very similar "Order confirmed Transaction ID: XXX"
  - maaaats 7y ago
    Their job is to automatically distribute content on fake blogs and fake social media profiles, not too far out to think they do the same with their own services, pumping them with comments from fake profiles. The first post on the first page of that thread is an interesting read, what a way to market your services.
- cookie_monsta 7y ago
  > They are not called “dropped domains”, the term used more often is “expired domains”. Well they obviously are if they're called something else more frequently. But I've heard them called both, interchangeably with equal frequency. I think this is a bit nitpicky > they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are dropped. Ummm... even before they expire? :)
  - 7y ago
gwbas1c 7y ago
Years ago, I once googled my name to find someone with the same name in the UK who was a bit of a fluffy motivational speaker. I laughed, and forgot about him. A few months later, I googled my name and all that came up were fluffy blog entries he wrote on various generic blogs. They were all slightly different. He pushed me off the front page. Granted, I don't really care about being found online. (Just leads to too much spam, recruiters are the worst.) But, a few days later I happened to be on Google's campus and someone who tracked those things struck up a conversation with me. I politely pointed out the gimmick that the other person did. Normally, I don't like pulling strings, but I certainly had the last laugh at that one!
- luckylion 7y ago
  How do they say? Big if true! Unless it was a general algorithmic change that took care of that, manually intervening in the Serps for personal favors would be completely against Google's stated rules. If possible (I have some doubts), it's probably a nice side gig for employees, since rankings are easily worth millions.
  - lgats 7y ago
    A Manual Action would be more probable https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en
smt88 7y ago
It seems like a consequence of the search engine monopoly is that the SEO side of the arms race only has one target. If we had many important engines with many algorithms, it might dilute any particular tactic that SEO uses.
- luckylion 7y ago
  They would likely work in a similar way, being susceptible to the same tactics. Imho, the main problem is that there's no deterrent. Even if you get caught doing some very black hat stuff, worst thing that can happen is to get a manual penalty. Remove the outlawed stuff, wait a month or two, submit a reinclusion request and you're back in business. If it was a "once you're caught, you're out for good" thing, SEOs would tread much more carefully.
  - smt88 7y ago
    I disagree that they'd work the same way because Google has invested millions of person-hours into a proprietary algorithm that they share with no one. DDG and Bing often have wildly differing results for me.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      That's true, but I believe that they'd arrive at similar techniques if they were rivaling Google. Today, it's a Cyborg-Behemoth vs a few scrap-yard tinkerers. If Bing & DDG had the budget and manpower Google has, the results would probably become more similar - but who knows, there might be completely different approaches to search that we just haven't seen. In any case, we probably do agree that it would be very good in general if there was more competition in the search market.
- jstarfish 7y ago
  It's funny, we used to go to Dogpile or Jeeves when Yahoo's results were crap and you couldnt be bothered to go search Lycos, Altavista and dozen others (and all the hyper-specialized ones). Then Google hit the scene and it gave equal or better results than the aggregators. Now Google themselves gives dodgy or inconsistent results that incentivize one to look elsewhere, but I don't think it is entirely their fault-- charlatans can crank out chum content faster than it can be analyzed and indexed. Google is doing the best the can...they have their own financial interests but they happen to align with ensuring people trust their results. The scale and nature of the web these days is very different than it was in '96. There was a competing engine popping up every year-- an endless cycle of "___ sucks, use ___ instead." But I haven't heard of anything other than Google and DDG since Cuil failed.
richardw 7y ago
Search for "<my area> plumber" returns totally gamed results. Has for years. No idea why that obvious use case is so broken. My wife hired one and the plumber was useless so I investigated. I've found obvious spam nests of multiple sites with duplicate styling and nothing seems to have changed.
- praptak 7y ago
  You can report these to Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1 https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1 Edit: better link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en
  - gnulinux 7y ago
    I've been reporting things like this for years and never seen anything change for better. I'm not saying Google doesn't care, but it seems like they cannot tell apart signal from noise so they can't fix these scams.
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      No money in it. My unsubstantiated guess is that being part of the search team became uncool a while back because it wasn't new and shiny.
      - NewsAware 7y ago
        Something like "[myarea] open locked door" can have Google ad bids in the range of 30$,so there may be money in there for Google not caring for quality organic results
        Scoundreller 7y ago
        Whenever a company pisses me off, I turn off my adblocker, do a few searches for them or that industry, and click their ads whenever they appear. I also like to see who’s advertising because it shows which industries/companies compete on marketing, instead of their own merits. It really shows which products have high marginal profits.
davidy123 7y ago
What I notice is that Google routinely returns fairly random sites that simply take Wikipedia's content and game SEO so they show up for "wiki <term>." Those results come and go. Google clearly does a lot of customisation for particular concerns, given how important Wikipedia is, I'm surprised to see these occasional results.
- liveoneggs 7y ago
  this is a throwback to mirroring wikipedia and adding ads, which was an effective business for about a year in 2007-ish
- llao 7y ago
  Also Stackoverflow/Stackexchange clones. With automatic translations. Really really bad translations.
bluepeter 7y ago
As a legit biz trying to win legit links, this is such a hassle to deal with. Perhaps even worse is the rise of "barely legal" blogs... (though these may be the same thing as PBN I suppose), but, by these, I mean, sure, they're original content, original "reviews," and "legitimate" blogs. But the articles are pumped out en masse, often written in sub-par English, with nothing more than re-wording of a reviewed site's "about us" page. (Perhaps they're even training Markov models on reviewed sites' content?) But they increasingly dominate searches, particularly in the B2B and B2C tech space. Do these serve customers' search intent? They're simple gateway pages: the content is often not really "readable." But since Google favors "reviews" and pages that link to many other top 10 SERPs, they dominate, vs legit product pages. Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists. Just endless lists of "alternatives to X," and "rankings of XYZ products" (with next to no legit reviews), or "here's the stack this company uses." All designed to get widespread long tail links.
- cloverich 7y ago
  > Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists These drive me nuts. I wish there was a way to incorporate trusted users flagging sites like this. I'm sure there's technical issues with it, but ideally it would let you "hide results from this site" to both keep them from popping up _and_ serve as a flag against the site.
  - davesmith1983 7y ago
    That is open to abuse in other ways. For example on Youtube there are frequently flagging campaigns from one group by constantly reporting a channel.
    - heavenlyblue 7y ago
      If you really think about this, that looks totally like spamming someone (which is totally illegal). This could be illegal as much. Especially in the long run.
- whalabi 7y ago
AndrewStephens 7y ago
I've had my entire site cloned by scammers looking for content. I fought back by continuing to publish boring and ill-written posts that no one wants to read. That shut them down after a few months. I don't know why they bothered. As this article notes, content is cheap. You can always find someone to write empty words for pennies. I can see no easy way for Google to combat this apart from boosting trusted sites. One way to try to raise your PageRank is to submit your own articles to HackerNews, like whalabi just did. Nothing wrong with that - I've done it myself - but it didn't work for me.
- fasicle 7y ago
  Isn't one of the key ranking factors time users spend on the page? Wouldn't poorly written / empty worded articles cause users to bounce quickly thus causing them to rank poorly?
  - krisroadruck 7y ago
    Heh there is a bit of debate about that actually. Google claims bounce-rate isn't factored in, but most of the search community doesn't believe them. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bounce-rate-signal-23671.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bounce-rate-signal-23671...
  - AndrewStephens 7y ago
    > Isn't one of the key ranking factors time users spend on the page? In the original PageRank? No. These days, who knows? But Google only knows how long people stay on the page using Google Analytics and many sites (mine, for instance) don't use it. I am a quick reader and are very good at quickly skimming articles. I hope Google doesn't rank pages based on time spent, since Google would be optimizing their search away from my preferences.
    - ComputerGuru 7y ago
      No, Google also tracks backwards navigation back to the results pages.
jacknews 7y ago
grrrr there's -> there are
- whalabi 7y ago
  Bad habit of mine :) Thanks for the heads-up
krisroadruck 7y ago
I gave a talk on how to properly set up PBNs / Site Networks way back in 2011 https://youtu.be/r23NYXiorUo https://youtu.be/r23NYXiorUo The thing is, this mostly stopped being relevant about 2ish years later circa 2013-2014. Google massively improved its ability to identify and penalize or discount these things. You can still make effective PBNs to this day, but the cost to get them to pass the google sniff test is basically on par with just doing legitimate marketing, but carries additional risk. Given that, most of the serious search marketers I know have long since abandoned these crappy tactics in favor of serving searcher intent and earning relevant links through smart content promotion and outreach. Folks who still buy and sell this stuff are mostly people who haven't updated their skills in a very long time, or those that prey on the same.
- jaequery 7y ago
  Can you elaborate on how getting your content promoted and outreached?
  - krisroadruck 7y ago
    There are a large number of effective tactics available, but really you have to pick and choose them based on the niche/budget/funnel position/search intent/search features of a particular query/ect. Some common example tactics include: Broken Backlink Building: Create high quality page, then look for pages that have historically served the same searcher intent and attracted backlinks but are now no longer available and reach out to sites that linked to that and offer them the newer resource to fix their broken link. Skyscraper technique: Make a list of similar pages that serve same search intent as a term or topic you are going after, sorted by relevance and links earned. Make a significantly better page, then reach out to webmasters linking to the other resource and suggest your better/more-up-to-date/relevant to readers link as an alternative. Social Proof Pitch: Before promoting your content to Journo's and Bloggers, try to get it to the top of a subreddit or the reddit homepage or otherwise demonstrate its popularity on other social networks. Then when you pitch it you can point to it likely being a useful resource. Also works if the thing you got to do well socially is a stub of a story and you offer to write in-depth about it or about an important part of a larger story as a guest post. Citable elements: Make otherwise hard-to-link-to pages like landing pages easier to link to by adding relevant citable elements (charts, graphs, facts & figures) that bloggers and journo's may wish to reference. Unlinked Brand Mentions: Set up alerts for any time your brand is mentioned. If you see one that isn't a link but a link would be relevant in the context of the article, ask the author to make the mention a link. HARO / SourceBottle / Reporter Connection: Make yourself available as a subject matter expert to reporters, and when giving expert quotes, reference deeper explanations in articles already present on your site. Reverse Guest Post: Pay or entice industry authority/influencer to write something on your site to attract additional eyeballs to your other content. Topical Interviews / Industry Round-ups / Guest Speaking ( podcasts, video, conferences): Go places where relevant audiences already exist and get them interested in hearing more from you. Get Friendly with Pirates: Use copyscape or reverse image search to find people who are using your content or images without proper attribution. Instead of sending take-down requests, ask that they credit, with a link the source and or do a cross domain rel canonical to the original content. And so on, and so forth. Good Search marketers have a wide variety of tactics at their disposal. Great search marketers will only apply the relevant ones rather than trying to offer clients one-size-fits all strategies. Edit: A lot of these are much easier with the help of some tools like ahrefs, semrush, pitchbox/buzzstream, hunter.io and the like.
emerongi 7y ago
A lot of search results in my native language return totally garbage results where clearly they just scraped for keywords and then threw them on a site. Another tactic is to Google Translate articles from other languages, which obviously ends with a totally unreadable post, but it still ranks well because it hits some keywords. It's actually weird that these rank so high. The very least Google used to do well was to filter this garbage. I can understand them losing the SEO battle, but that they fail to filter straight-up spam is quite interesting.
cfv 7y ago
One of my first freelancing gigs was for a guy who maintained one of these. He peddled this pills and had built an impressive (by 2009 standards) network of 87 WP installs with generated crap in them that linked heavily with each other, all on this OVH instance and had managed to break one of the plugins he used for this purpose, so he posted a bid on GetAFreelancer, which I won and never saw a cent for. I'm still really pissed about that for some reason.
- ErikAugust 7y ago
  Which reminds me of a golden rule of freelancing: If they do scummy things, they’ll probably do scummy things to you.
reallydontask 7y ago
Interestingly enough my blog that had little traffic (at best 15000 page views and probably 2 or 3 comments per month) also had some posts cloned. Not even necessarily the most popular ones. The cloned posts ranked higher than my blog posts
qwerty456127 7y ago
Always. I had been in touch with this industry until 2010 and that was as easy (and profitable) as if it was a feature, intended this way. Later on, as far as I know, algorithms have changes a couple of times but that didn't change much, just minor inconvenience SEO guys routinely adapt to. If I didn't care about people's jobs and wasn't libertarian I'd say SEO should be outlawed.
rdtwo 7y ago
A good example is the entire category of “Gardening”. The real content is nearly impossible to find and it’s completely full of blog spam and low quality generic content. The keywords must be valuable so it’s a good indicator of how bad google search has gotten.
- blunte 7y ago
  And it's an uphill battle to teach "regular people" to not simply click one of the top links on Google and believe what it says. This is especially true for health and wealth topics. Sadly, it seems most people cannot distinguish between content provided by people with a genuine interest and knowledge between "content" of no substance or authority.
  - rdtwo 7y ago
    A lot of the garbage content is designed to look like real content and it can often take 10-20 seconds to figure out that the generated content is just fluff and offers nothing new or useful. That’s probably long enough for google to accept it as good content. In gardening this is especially true because one could simply copy the text on the back of a seed packet and add filler words to make a paragraph. For a lot of these types of topics and blogs google should really look at re-engagement scores. How many many times the user comes back to the same page, how many times it’s bookmarked and how often the user views other content on the page. That being said I think google is probably complicit in reducing search quality because doing so Allows them to present many times the number of ads. If it takes 20-30 websites and multiple searches to find a decent article on growing strawberries then they would have generated that much extra ad revenue. There isn’t an incentive to get search right, just right enough that they are better than bing and that’s not a hard metric to beat.
  - pixl97 7y ago
    How are you supposed to tell if you dont know about a subject?
- Matsta 7y ago
  Most of these guys will making Amazon affiliate sites where they recommend products throughout their content and make comission when you click on the link.
chewz 7y ago
Google Search occasionaly delivers useful results. But DDG in my native language? OMG. 99% results is machine generated, machine translated fake sites. It feels like walking in endless landfill.
mtnGoat 7y ago
i have learned that a lot of terms, specially ones worth money, have been gamed in google for almost a decade. it's really not hard to do at all. If i know i am searching for a competitive term, i will sometimes try bing instead. it has been gamed as well.
chimen 7y ago
One of my side projects is battling on a difficult keyword. It's going up and made it to top 5 after 3 years. I'm monitoring SEO using ahrefs. 1 year ago I saw a new website going to top position (grammarchecker.net) out of nowhere so I got interested in finding out their "story". Domain was new, never saw that website when I researched my competition and it was on top positions on multiple keywords. The tool itself is nothing but a wrapper to `languagetool`, stuff that you can see on hundreds of other websites starting from page 2 in search results. Digging through the data I was amazed to discover that he's basically running xrummer to comment on all the possible blogs and forums out there, on discussions and topics completely unrelated to the target website so yeah 2000's hacks are still valid. 1 year passed and he's still above me. How are they unable to detect a comment spam towards a new domain? Blog posts spammed to death with thousands of unrelated comments that even my 8 year old could spot.
- WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
  Because they haven't looked into this specific website and you did.
- WillPostForFood 7y ago
  It is even worse because there are multiple victims - You lose your place in search, people searching get bad results, and people trying to run a forum or any site where there is user content get crushed with SEO spam.
- bhartzer 7y ago
  You see all those xrummer blog comment links and forum links out there... but that does NOT mean that it's helping. Most likely those links are just there to hide the links that are actually helping the site rank. That's typically done in cases such as the one you're describing. If you can spot it, Google can spot it and just ignores those links.
  - fileeditview 7y ago
    Wow polluting the internet to protect your Golden Goose sites for backlinks.. I usually expect the worst but this wasn't on my radar. It seems very plausible however.
huffmsa 7y ago
The big G has gotten comfortable and complacent atop their throne. Search quality has been on the decline for a while now, but in the past 3-6 months it's gotten really really bad for anything that isn't mainstream and popular. I have more "showing results for XYZ, do you want to see results for your actual query QRS?" than just showing QRS. Yeah, I do, that's why I typed it. > 10 results for QRS. Still irrelevant and excluding words, even in quotes The search team must have lost a lot of talent recently, it's amateur hour.
superasn 7y ago
Google is to blame as much as these people who are gaming their search. The number one tip most SEO blogs cite these days is to use AMP. It can skyrocket a crummy site over a non AMP site with much better content for many trending keywords. I find that this type of thing is equivalent to gaming the search results as it would be by doing low quality blogs. Just this time the hack is offered by the G itself.
calibas 7y ago
So long as you use an algorithm to rank content, people will be able to reverse-engineer it and game Google Search results. Of course, without an algorithm I have no idea how they could possibly rank billions of web pages.
- i_am_nomad 7y ago
  "As soon as you define a metric to measure a goal, the metric itself becomes the goal." I'm sure I'm mangling that quotation, but that's the phenomenon you're describing, or at least a close relative of it.
  - Majromax 7y ago
    You're looking for Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law): "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
- snaky 7y ago
  Do we have an idea how could Wikipedia generate millions of web pages with no algorithm?
zepto 7y ago
It seems like a pretty straightforward way to improve search for the end user would be to allow end user personalization. For example search results could include ‘prioritize results from this site’, and ‘never show results from this site’ as options on each result. As far as I can see the only reason this kind of search customization is not offered is because it would undermine Google’s business model.
- rdtwo 7y ago
  It also seems that certain bad actors are owned by large media companies that have successfully lobbied google to stay listed.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Mutual backrubbing. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
- maaaats 7y ago
  It was possible years ago I think? Vaguely remember to having blocked experts-exchange, quora and other you-must-be-a-member-to-actually-see-the-content pages
  - zepto 7y ago
    Yes - they experimented with this a while back. But they dropped it because it works against the business model.
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cryptica 7y ago
It's definitely all about capital now. The algorithms are just not smart enough to make accurate judgements in such a competitive landscape... It might have worked a few decades ago when competition was low, but now the idea that an algorithm can outsmart an army of human SEO experts is ridiculous. I wonder if things would be better if Google went back to the old approach of Yahoo which involved hiring humans to manually rank the pages (at least partially). I think search results would be significantly better.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  In a way, google does. They track which result you click on, and how long you stay on that page. If google knows who the robots are, and who the humans are, there’s a lot more human input to outweigh a human SEO team managing a team of bots. And google can probably determine which users are best at determining page value and weight their input highly.
- Matsta 7y ago
  Very true, Whitehat SEO is more comparable to doing a PR campaign nowdays.
d7 7y ago
I think they are boosting ranking for Google Aanalytics integrated sites with DoubleClick cookies running. If you remove or change analytics Google tanks your ranking. I ran experiments including google ads for a few months a couple of years ago. They set me up with an account manager who moved me to a new analytics account that added Doubleclick cookies. I've been trying to remove the advertising cookies since then and it's impossible from within the Analytics console. If I plug in a new Analytics account my SEO placement tanks. I feel like it's a racket that gives away my site's user data in exchange for rankings. Help!
tareqak 7y ago
Over the last few months, I've had a thought that only very recently I've been able to put into words: it's more profitable to appear to be a source of truth than it is to actually be a source of truth.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  This generalises. True value is expensive both to create and assess. The tricksters arbitrage both sides of this exchange. -- the producers and consumers. And yes, sometimes the deception may be in appearing to be something not valuable but instead high-risk: bluff threats, imitation of poisonous or stinging animals or insects, inflatable tanks. "All warfare is based on deception." https://suntzusaid.com/book/1 https://suntzusaid.com/book/1
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Animats 7y ago
If Google cared about this, they could fix it. They don't have an adequate system for checking business legitimacy. If they tried hard to filter out the domains that have no identifiable real-world business behind them, or which are way too publicized for their real world size, they could fix this.
aaron695 7y ago
The Blackhat PBN info-graphic they show a little of isn't bad. Full original here - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-pleasure-is-kicking-your-rivals-out-the-playboy-pbn-is-back-top-trusted-pbn-posts-at-1-8.731956/ https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-pleasure-is-kicking-yo...
malicioususer11 7y ago
Im Sorry, did you mean "Gamer Girl Bath Water"? :3
malicioususer11 7y ago
also, its happening with predictive typing and spelling correction too now...

354 points by whalabi 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

I see the OP submitted this article. To be honest, PBN's are nowhere near as effective as they were a couple of years ago. The chance of getting a manual action against your site is a lot higher. If you were going to drop a few thousand dollars on buying backlinks, you don't want to have your site de-indexed by Google in 6 months without getting an ROI. Non-English versions of Google are more linens and are still easy to game for PBN's. Also, all PBN's are not all created equally. Making sure the domain isn't dropped, different whois details/domain registrars/hosting providers. Also putting relevant links to sites other than what clients have paid for to make this look more legitimate. Niches with big competition like Pharma/Gambling/Game Hacks/Lead Gen will continue to user PBN's, but bigger SEO's will be diversifying their link building portfolio by building more whitehat links like guest posts and then sending more questionable links like PBN's to them as a tier 2 backlink.

fasicle 7y ago
I wonder why non-English versions of Google are behind on this (I agree that they are), surely much of the Google search algorithm is language independent?
- celeritascelery 7y ago
  I don’t see how it could be, language semantics and homographs are different everywhere. They must have to make adjustments.
  - fasicle 7y ago
    I agree they have to make adjustments, however factors such as number of backlinks from high DA sites, user dwell time on page, schema markup, meta data structure, https, domain age, mobile friendliness, page speed etc. don't require an understanding of language.
- ma2rten 7y ago
  Probably because of manual anti-spam action.
- sammyQc 7y ago
  Less data available in smaller market for the algorithms to work with, noise vs. signal ratio. And it’s a snow balling effect, they still need to provide results to users, and with more spammy websites in a market the average website can get away with more dodgy tactics.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
On that note, there's also a technique, forgot the name, but it's basically anti-SEO where they intentionally push a competitor's pages onto a PBN with the intent of getting it detected (and penalized) by Google.
- liveoneggs 7y ago
  yeah then you get to play the disavow game
- paulcole 7y ago
  Had a competitor do this to a site with a bunch of really weird porno links. Kept happening for months. I'd disavow them, 10x as many would show up weeks later. Eventually I lost interest fighting and just stopped disavowing them. There was never any penalty and from what I could tell the extra links actually helped our rankings! After about 18 months the links stopped. No clue what happened.
- Matsta 7y ago
  It's called negative SEO. There was a Google update that is a bit more lenient so your competitors can't negatively spam your site. Unless your competitor had some serious dosh to mass spam your site on PBN's, they would most likely being using a tool like Xrumer or GSA where you can purchase a 100k backlink blast for as little as $5
  - dmix 7y ago
    Companies are actively engaging in negative SEO all the time too. My friend used to work at a shady SEO shop in Florida and they used it often. Their clients don’t seem to care how it gets there since they mostly pushing affiliate ads, not a sustainable long term business.
jfoster 7y ago
What you describe at the end isn't whitehat. Whitehat (according to Google, from what I can gather) is focusing on site experience and just ensuring search engines are facilitated in indexing.
- Matsta 7y ago
  True, building any sort of backlinks are aganist Google's ToS. But that doesn't mean legitmate don't do it. You just need to be smart about it and make sure it looks "natural" to Google.

bhartzer 7y ago

They are not called “dropped domains”, the term used more often is “expired domains”. The author doesn’t even mention how registrars are a player and part of this, as they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are dropped. Google has done a lot since 2011 to identify pbns and take them down. This article seems a bit outdated.

Matsta 7y ago
Agreed. Also the forum he's referencing to is BlackHatWorld for those curious. It's well known that some of the sellers on there are artificially inflating their views and replies, and a few of the top sellers are probably using hacked logins to write reviews (their database was leaked a few years ago: https://hacked-emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhatworld-com/ https://hacked-emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhat...) For example, take a look at this thread: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/captain-jack-sparrow-2019-200-premium-foundation-linksdevil-circuit-rank-boostersummer-50-off.654231/page-362 https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/captain-jack-sparrow-2019-... Thousands of replies that all sound very similar "Order confirmed Transaction ID: XXX"
- maaaats 7y ago
  Their job is to automatically distribute content on fake blogs and fake social media profiles, not too far out to think they do the same with their own services, pumping them with comments from fake profiles. The first post on the first page of that thread is an interesting read, what a way to market your services.
cookie_monsta 7y ago
> They are not called “dropped domains”, the term used more often is “expired domains”. Well they obviously are if they're called something else more frequently. But I've heard them called both, interchangeably with equal frequency. I think this is a bit nitpicky > they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are dropped. Ummm... even before they expire? :)
- 7y ago

gwbas1c 7y ago

Years ago, I once googled my name to find someone with the same name in the UK who was a bit of a fluffy motivational speaker. I laughed, and forgot about him. A few months later, I googled my name and all that came up were fluffy blog entries he wrote on various generic blogs. They were all slightly different. He pushed me off the front page. Granted, I don't really care about being found online. (Just leads to too much spam, recruiters are the worst.) But, a few days later I happened to be on Google's campus and someone who tracked those things struck up a conversation with me. I politely pointed out the gimmick that the other person did. Normally, I don't like pulling strings, but I certainly had the last laugh at that one!

luckylion 7y ago
How do they say? Big if true! Unless it was a general algorithmic change that took care of that, manually intervening in the Serps for personal favors would be completely against Google's stated rules. If possible (I have some doubts), it's probably a nice side gig for employees, since rankings are easily worth millions.
- lgats 7y ago
  A Manual Action would be more probable https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en

smt88 7y ago

It seems like a consequence of the search engine monopoly is that the SEO side of the arms race only has one target. If we had many important engines with many algorithms, it might dilute any particular tactic that SEO uses.

luckylion 7y ago
They would likely work in a similar way, being susceptible to the same tactics. Imho, the main problem is that there's no deterrent. Even if you get caught doing some very black hat stuff, worst thing that can happen is to get a manual penalty. Remove the outlawed stuff, wait a month or two, submit a reinclusion request and you're back in business. If it was a "once you're caught, you're out for good" thing, SEOs would tread much more carefully.
- smt88 7y ago
  I disagree that they'd work the same way because Google has invested millions of person-hours into a proprietary algorithm that they share with no one. DDG and Bing often have wildly differing results for me.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    That's true, but I believe that they'd arrive at similar techniques if they were rivaling Google. Today, it's a Cyborg-Behemoth vs a few scrap-yard tinkerers. If Bing & DDG had the budget and manpower Google has, the results would probably become more similar - but who knows, there might be completely different approaches to search that we just haven't seen. In any case, we probably do agree that it would be very good in general if there was more competition in the search market.
jstarfish 7y ago
It's funny, we used to go to Dogpile or Jeeves when Yahoo's results were crap and you couldnt be bothered to go search Lycos, Altavista and dozen others (and all the hyper-specialized ones). Then Google hit the scene and it gave equal or better results than the aggregators. Now Google themselves gives dodgy or inconsistent results that incentivize one to look elsewhere, but I don't think it is entirely their fault-- charlatans can crank out chum content faster than it can be analyzed and indexed. Google is doing the best the can...they have their own financial interests but they happen to align with ensuring people trust their results. The scale and nature of the web these days is very different than it was in '96. There was a competing engine popping up every year-- an endless cycle of "___ sucks, use ___ instead." But I haven't heard of anything other than Google and DDG since Cuil failed.

richardw 7y ago

Search for "<my area> plumber" returns totally gamed results. Has for years. No idea why that obvious use case is so broken. My wife hired one and the plumber was useless so I investigated. I've found obvious spam nests of multiple sites with duplicate styling and nothing seems to have changed.

praptak 7y ago
You can report these to Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1 https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1 Edit: better link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en
- gnulinux 7y ago
  I've been reporting things like this for years and never seen anything change for better. I'm not saying Google doesn't care, but it seems like they cannot tell apart signal from noise so they can't fix these scams.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    No money in it. My unsubstantiated guess is that being part of the search team became uncool a while back because it wasn't new and shiny.
    - NewsAware 7y ago
      Something like "[myarea] open locked door" can have Google ad bids in the range of 30$,so there may be money in there for Google not caring for quality organic results
      - Scoundreller 7y ago
        Whenever a company pisses me off, I turn off my adblocker, do a few searches for them or that industry, and click their ads whenever they appear. I also like to see who’s advertising because it shows which industries/companies compete on marketing, instead of their own merits. It really shows which products have high marginal profits.

davidy123 7y ago

What I notice is that Google routinely returns fairly random sites that simply take Wikipedia's content and game SEO so they show up for "wiki <term>." Those results come and go. Google clearly does a lot of customisation for particular concerns, given how important Wikipedia is, I'm surprised to see these occasional results.

liveoneggs 7y ago
this is a throwback to mirroring wikipedia and adding ads, which was an effective business for about a year in 2007-ish
llao 7y ago
Also Stackoverflow/Stackexchange clones. With automatic translations. Really really bad translations.

bluepeter 7y ago

As a legit biz trying to win legit links, this is such a hassle to deal with. Perhaps even worse is the rise of "barely legal" blogs... (though these may be the same thing as PBN I suppose), but, by these, I mean, sure, they're original content, original "reviews," and "legitimate" blogs. But the articles are pumped out en masse, often written in sub-par English, with nothing more than re-wording of a reviewed site's "about us" page. (Perhaps they're even training Markov models on reviewed sites' content?) But they increasingly dominate searches, particularly in the B2B and B2C tech space. Do these serve customers' search intent? They're simple gateway pages: the content is often not really "readable." But since Google favors "reviews" and pages that link to many other top 10 SERPs, they dominate, vs legit product pages. Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists. Just endless lists of "alternatives to X," and "rankings of XYZ products" (with next to no legit reviews), or "here's the stack this company uses." All designed to get widespread long tail links.

cloverich 7y ago
> Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists These drive me nuts. I wish there was a way to incorporate trusted users flagging sites like this. I'm sure there's technical issues with it, but ideally it would let you "hide results from this site" to both keep them from popping up _and_ serve as a flag against the site.
- davesmith1983 7y ago
  That is open to abuse in other ways. For example on Youtube there are frequently flagging campaigns from one group by constantly reporting a channel.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    If you really think about this, that looks totally like spamming someone (which is totally illegal). This could be illegal as much. Especially in the long run.
whalabi 7y ago

AndrewStephens 7y ago

I've had my entire site cloned by scammers looking for content. I fought back by continuing to publish boring and ill-written posts that no one wants to read. That shut them down after a few months. I don't know why they bothered. As this article notes, content is cheap. You can always find someone to write empty words for pennies. I can see no easy way for Google to combat this apart from boosting trusted sites. One way to try to raise your PageRank is to submit your own articles to HackerNews, like whalabi just did. Nothing wrong with that - I've done it myself - but it didn't work for me.

fasicle 7y ago
Isn't one of the key ranking factors time users spend on the page? Wouldn't poorly written / empty worded articles cause users to bounce quickly thus causing them to rank poorly?
- krisroadruck 7y ago
  Heh there is a bit of debate about that actually. Google claims bounce-rate isn't factored in, but most of the search community doesn't believe them. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bounce-rate-signal-23671.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bounce-rate-signal-23671...
- AndrewStephens 7y ago
  > Isn't one of the key ranking factors time users spend on the page? In the original PageRank? No. These days, who knows? But Google only knows how long people stay on the page using Google Analytics and many sites (mine, for instance) don't use it. I am a quick reader and are very good at quickly skimming articles. I hope Google doesn't rank pages based on time spent, since Google would be optimizing their search away from my preferences.
  - ComputerGuru 7y ago
    No, Google also tracks backwards navigation back to the results pages.

jacknews 7y ago

grrrr there's -> there are

whalabi 7y ago
Bad habit of mine :) Thanks for the heads-up

krisroadruck 7y ago

I gave a talk on how to properly set up PBNs / Site Networks way back in 2011 https://youtu.be/r23NYXiorUo https://youtu.be/r23NYXiorUo The thing is, this mostly stopped being relevant about 2ish years later circa 2013-2014. Google massively improved its ability to identify and penalize or discount these things. You can still make effective PBNs to this day, but the cost to get them to pass the google sniff test is basically on par with just doing legitimate marketing, but carries additional risk. Given that, most of the serious search marketers I know have long since abandoned these crappy tactics in favor of serving searcher intent and earning relevant links through smart content promotion and outreach. Folks who still buy and sell this stuff are mostly people who haven't updated their skills in a very long time, or those that prey on the same.

jaequery 7y ago
Can you elaborate on how getting your content promoted and outreached?
- krisroadruck 7y ago
  There are a large number of effective tactics available, but really you have to pick and choose them based on the niche/budget/funnel position/search intent/search features of a particular query/ect. Some common example tactics include: Broken Backlink Building: Create high quality page, then look for pages that have historically served the same searcher intent and attracted backlinks but are now no longer available and reach out to sites that linked to that and offer them the newer resource to fix their broken link. Skyscraper technique: Make a list of similar pages that serve same search intent as a term or topic you are going after, sorted by relevance and links earned. Make a significantly better page, then reach out to webmasters linking to the other resource and suggest your better/more-up-to-date/relevant to readers link as an alternative. Social Proof Pitch: Before promoting your content to Journo's and Bloggers, try to get it to the top of a subreddit or the reddit homepage or otherwise demonstrate its popularity on other social networks. Then when you pitch it you can point to it likely being a useful resource. Also works if the thing you got to do well socially is a stub of a story and you offer to write in-depth about it or about an important part of a larger story as a guest post. Citable elements: Make otherwise hard-to-link-to pages like landing pages easier to link to by adding relevant citable elements (charts, graphs, facts & figures) that bloggers and journo's may wish to reference. Unlinked Brand Mentions: Set up alerts for any time your brand is mentioned. If you see one that isn't a link but a link would be relevant in the context of the article, ask the author to make the mention a link. HARO / SourceBottle / Reporter Connection: Make yourself available as a subject matter expert to reporters, and when giving expert quotes, reference deeper explanations in articles already present on your site. Reverse Guest Post: Pay or entice industry authority/influencer to write something on your site to attract additional eyeballs to your other content. Topical Interviews / Industry Round-ups / Guest Speaking ( podcasts, video, conferences): Go places where relevant audiences already exist and get them interested in hearing more from you. Get Friendly with Pirates: Use copyscape or reverse image search to find people who are using your content or images without proper attribution. Instead of sending take-down requests, ask that they credit, with a link the source and or do a cross domain rel canonical to the original content. And so on, and so forth. Good Search marketers have a wide variety of tactics at their disposal. Great search marketers will only apply the relevant ones rather than trying to offer clients one-size-fits all strategies. Edit: A lot of these are much easier with the help of some tools like ahrefs, semrush, pitchbox/buzzstream, hunter.io and the like.

emerongi 7y ago

A lot of search results in my native language return totally garbage results where clearly they just scraped for keywords and then threw them on a site. Another tactic is to Google Translate articles from other languages, which obviously ends with a totally unreadable post, but it still ranks well because it hits some keywords. It's actually weird that these rank so high. The very least Google used to do well was to filter this garbage. I can understand them losing the SEO battle, but that they fail to filter straight-up spam is quite interesting.

cfv 7y ago

One of my first freelancing gigs was for a guy who maintained one of these. He peddled this pills and had built an impressive (by 2009 standards) network of 87 WP installs with generated crap in them that linked heavily with each other, all on this OVH instance and had managed to break one of the plugins he used for this purpose, so he posted a bid on GetAFreelancer, which I won and never saw a cent for. I'm still really pissed about that for some reason.

ErikAugust 7y ago
Which reminds me of a golden rule of freelancing: If they do scummy things, they’ll probably do scummy things to you.

reallydontask 7y ago

Interestingly enough my blog that had little traffic (at best 15000 page views and probably 2 or 3 comments per month) also had some posts cloned. Not even necessarily the most popular ones. The cloned posts ranked higher than my blog posts

qwerty456127 7y ago

Always. I had been in touch with this industry until 2010 and that was as easy (and profitable) as if it was a feature, intended this way. Later on, as far as I know, algorithms have changes a couple of times but that didn't change much, just minor inconvenience SEO guys routinely adapt to. If I didn't care about people's jobs and wasn't libertarian I'd say SEO should be outlawed.

rdtwo 7y ago

A good example is the entire category of “Gardening”. The real content is nearly impossible to find and it’s completely full of blog spam and low quality generic content. The keywords must be valuable so it’s a good indicator of how bad google search has gotten.

blunte 7y ago
And it's an uphill battle to teach "regular people" to not simply click one of the top links on Google and believe what it says. This is especially true for health and wealth topics. Sadly, it seems most people cannot distinguish between content provided by people with a genuine interest and knowledge between "content" of no substance or authority.
- rdtwo 7y ago
  A lot of the garbage content is designed to look like real content and it can often take 10-20 seconds to figure out that the generated content is just fluff and offers nothing new or useful. That’s probably long enough for google to accept it as good content. In gardening this is especially true because one could simply copy the text on the back of a seed packet and add filler words to make a paragraph. For a lot of these types of topics and blogs google should really look at re-engagement scores. How many many times the user comes back to the same page, how many times it’s bookmarked and how often the user views other content on the page. That being said I think google is probably complicit in reducing search quality because doing so Allows them to present many times the number of ads. If it takes 20-30 websites and multiple searches to find a decent article on growing strawberries then they would have generated that much extra ad revenue. There isn’t an incentive to get search right, just right enough that they are better than bing and that’s not a hard metric to beat.
- pixl97 7y ago
  How are you supposed to tell if you dont know about a subject?
Matsta 7y ago
Most of these guys will making Amazon affiliate sites where they recommend products throughout their content and make comission when you click on the link.

chewz 7y ago

Google Search occasionaly delivers useful results. But DDG in my native language? OMG. 99% results is machine generated, machine translated fake sites. It feels like walking in endless landfill.

mtnGoat 7y ago

i have learned that a lot of terms, specially ones worth money, have been gamed in google for almost a decade. it's really not hard to do at all. If i know i am searching for a competitive term, i will sometimes try bing instead. it has been gamed as well.

chimen 7y ago

One of my side projects is battling on a difficult keyword. It's going up and made it to top 5 after 3 years. I'm monitoring SEO using ahrefs. 1 year ago I saw a new website going to top position (grammarchecker.net) out of nowhere so I got interested in finding out their "story". Domain was new, never saw that website when I researched my competition and it was on top positions on multiple keywords. The tool itself is nothing but a wrapper to `languagetool`, stuff that you can see on hundreds of other websites starting from page 2 in search results. Digging through the data I was amazed to discover that he's basically running xrummer to comment on all the possible blogs and forums out there, on discussions and topics completely unrelated to the target website so yeah 2000's hacks are still valid. 1 year passed and he's still above me. How are they unable to detect a comment spam towards a new domain? Blog posts spammed to death with thousands of unrelated comments that even my 8 year old could spot.

WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
Because they haven't looked into this specific website and you did.
WillPostForFood 7y ago
It is even worse because there are multiple victims - You lose your place in search, people searching get bad results, and people trying to run a forum or any site where there is user content get crushed with SEO spam.
bhartzer 7y ago
You see all those xrummer blog comment links and forum links out there... but that does NOT mean that it's helping. Most likely those links are just there to hide the links that are actually helping the site rank. That's typically done in cases such as the one you're describing. If you can spot it, Google can spot it and just ignores those links.
- fileeditview 7y ago
  Wow polluting the internet to protect your Golden Goose sites for backlinks.. I usually expect the worst but this wasn't on my radar. It seems very plausible however.

huffmsa 7y ago

The big G has gotten comfortable and complacent atop their throne. Search quality has been on the decline for a while now, but in the past 3-6 months it's gotten really really bad for anything that isn't mainstream and popular. I have more "showing results for XYZ, do you want to see results for your actual query QRS?" than just showing QRS. Yeah, I do, that's why I typed it. > 10 results for QRS. Still irrelevant and excluding words, even in quotes The search team must have lost a lot of talent recently, it's amateur hour.

superasn 7y ago

Google is to blame as much as these people who are gaming their search. The number one tip most SEO blogs cite these days is to use AMP. It can skyrocket a crummy site over a non AMP site with much better content for many trending keywords. I find that this type of thing is equivalent to gaming the search results as it would be by doing low quality blogs. Just this time the hack is offered by the G itself.

calibas 7y ago

So long as you use an algorithm to rank content, people will be able to reverse-engineer it and game Google Search results. Of course, without an algorithm I have no idea how they could possibly rank billions of web pages.

i_am_nomad 7y ago
"As soon as you define a metric to measure a goal, the metric itself becomes the goal." I'm sure I'm mangling that quotation, but that's the phenomenon you're describing, or at least a close relative of it.
- Majromax 7y ago
  You're looking for Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law): "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
snaky 7y ago
Do we have an idea how could Wikipedia generate millions of web pages with no algorithm?

zepto 7y ago

It seems like a pretty straightforward way to improve search for the end user would be to allow end user personalization. For example search results could include ‘prioritize results from this site’, and ‘never show results from this site’ as options on each result. As far as I can see the only reason this kind of search customization is not offered is because it would undermine Google’s business model.

rdtwo 7y ago
It also seems that certain bad actors are owned by large media companies that have successfully lobbied google to stay listed.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Mutual backrubbing. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
maaaats 7y ago
It was possible years ago I think? Vaguely remember to having blocked experts-exchange, quora and other you-must-be-a-member-to-actually-see-the-content pages
- zepto 7y ago
  Yes - they experimented with this a while back. But they dropped it because it works against the business model.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cryptica 7y ago

It's definitely all about capital now. The algorithms are just not smart enough to make accurate judgements in such a competitive landscape... It might have worked a few decades ago when competition was low, but now the idea that an algorithm can outsmart an army of human SEO experts is ridiculous. I wonder if things would be better if Google went back to the old approach of Yahoo which involved hiring humans to manually rank the pages (at least partially). I think search results would be significantly better.

Scoundreller 7y ago
In a way, google does. They track which result you click on, and how long you stay on that page. If google knows who the robots are, and who the humans are, there’s a lot more human input to outweigh a human SEO team managing a team of bots. And google can probably determine which users are best at determining page value and weight their input highly.
Matsta 7y ago
Very true, Whitehat SEO is more comparable to doing a PR campaign nowdays.

d7 7y ago

I think they are boosting ranking for Google Aanalytics integrated sites with DoubleClick cookies running. If you remove or change analytics Google tanks your ranking. I ran experiments including google ads for a few months a couple of years ago. They set me up with an account manager who moved me to a new analytics account that added Doubleclick cookies. I've been trying to remove the advertising cookies since then and it's impossible from within the Analytics console. If I plug in a new Analytics account my SEO placement tanks. I feel like it's a racket that gives away my site's user data in exchange for rankings. Help!

tareqak 7y ago

Over the last few months, I've had a thought that only very recently I've been able to put into words: it's more profitable to appear to be a source of truth than it is to actually be a source of truth.

dredmorbius 7y ago
This generalises. True value is expensive both to create and assess. The tricksters arbitrage both sides of this exchange. -- the producers and consumers. And yes, sometimes the deception may be in appearing to be something not valuable but instead high-risk: bluff threats, imitation of poisonous or stinging animals or insects, inflatable tanks. "All warfare is based on deception." https://suntzusaid.com/book/1 https://suntzusaid.com/book/1

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Animats 7y ago

If Google cared about this, they could fix it. They don't have an adequate system for checking business legitimacy. If they tried hard to filter out the domains that have no identifiable real-world business behind them, or which are way too publicized for their real world size, they could fix this.

aaron695 7y ago

The Blackhat PBN info-graphic they show a little of isn't bad. Full original here - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-pleasure-is-kicking-your-rivals-out-the-playboy-pbn-is-back-top-trusted-pbn-posts-at-1-8.731956/ https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/the-pleasure-is-kicking-yo...

malicioususer11 7y ago

Im Sorry, did you mean "Gamer Girl Bath Water"? :3

malicioususer11 7y ago

also, its happening with predictive typing and spelling correction too now...