IMHO it’s both. Obviously people spend a lot of effort reverse engineering Google’s ranking algorithms because it’s profitable but some of it, at least from the

IMHO it’s both. Obviously people spend a lot of effort reverse engineering Google’s ranking algorithms because it’s profitable but some of it, at least from the outside, seems self-inflicted. Image search has been useless for me for a long time because of Pinterest. Many times Pinterest will show you an image but when you click on it it takes you to a page with completely different content. Maybe Google has a good reason for not penalizing Pinterest, but it’s weird to me that they are not more aggressive in sanitizing the quality of their searches.