> The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors But the bad actors don't really abuse technical standards. They abuse links. The only part in G

> The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors But the bad actors don't really abuse technical standards. They abuse links. The only part in Google's list of criteria that has largely remained untouched in the last two decades and is still the factor for ranking. So much so, that I'm confident that, if ranking factor relevance was a search result, the first page would just be the same result over and over: Links. That's the reason for the centralization of power: those with more links will be ranked on the top, will have more visibility and, you guessed it, get more links. Guess what happens: they then start to sell either links or they rent out subdomains and folders on their website. Google, as a company, does not care about bad actors. Some teams in Google do, but they are not the ones setting the policies.