Typically Google has a warming/trial period for new large content sites, after their search bot is introduced to the content and has spidered its way through th

Typically Google has a warming/trial period for new large content sites, after their search bot is introduced to the content and has spidered its way through the site. For example there used to be a very common content farm system, that was structured like like this: https://domainsites.com/site/nytimes.com https://domainsites.com/site/nytimes.com So when people searched for sites by domain name, the zillions of low traffic long-tail results of this farm system would be all over Google's results. What it would present on the page is a mess of data about nytimes.com, such as traffic, or keywords pulled from the site header, maybe a manufactured description (or pulled right from the site head), sometimes images / screenshots of the site. Anything that could be stuffed in there to fill up enough content to get Google to not do an automatic shallow content kill penalty on the content farm. This worked for several years very successfully until Google's big algorithm updates, 9-10 years ago or whatever now (Penguin et al.). You could just build a large index of the top million domains (eg Alexa and Quantcast used to provide that index in a zip file), spider & scrape info from the domains, and build a content farm index out of it and have a million pages of content to then hand off to Googlebot. So initially such a farm will boom into the search rankings, Google would give them a trial period and let out the flood gates of traffic to the site. Then Google would promptly kill off the content farm after the free run period expired and they had figured out it was a garbage site. I still occasionally see this model of content farm burst up into traffic rankings, and it's usually very short lived. It makes me wonder if that's not more or less what's going on with the Mermaid farm.