This is an obvious case of SEO spam. But there are tons and tons of other examples worth mentioning. For example many news sites have soft paywalls that can ea

This is an obvious case of SEO spam. But there are tons and tons of other examples worth mentioning. For example many news sites have soft paywalls that can easily be circumvented with a few clicks. The reason they don't have an _actual_ paywall is likely to come up in search results. So essentially they spam search results and obscure the content for technical illiterate users instead of just paying for ads. They want their cake and eat it too. Now this whole dynamic is super weird. We often talk about these issues as if Google was some kind of public service that should make useful and fair search suggestions. Sure they have the incentive to do so, but they have conflicting interests at the same time.