> Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to

> Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings. An algorithm could punish things inherent to SEO optimized sites (ads and tracking). Removing the ability to passively generate money without providing useful content is the key. Of the top of my head, a system like the following would be a pretty good start: Scale of 0 to 100 (closer to 100 being higher up on the results). You are penalized for the following: - subtract 10 points for any ad, using ublock origin's list as a good starting point (this stacks, it's 10 points off for each link) - subtract 100 points for google tag manager - subtract 100 points for the facebook like button - ... etc for each of the major tracking scripts This would obviously need to be updated as ad-tech evolves, but it would cut out 90% of the current SEO spam. Can google do this? No, they have a conflict of interest around placing ads. Somebody else, however, can absolutely do this.