6 ms·

My view of it is that they basically lost the SEO spam wars. Without the ML pipelines, the top results would all be dominated by the smaller, highly skilled, S

by tyingq 4y ago

My view of it is that they basically lost the SEO spam wars. Without the ML pipelines, the top results would all be dominated by the smaller, highly skilled, SEO manipulators. They didn't find a way to cleanly excise that spam, so they resorted to a very imperfect hammer...giving a lot of SEO weight to large corporate entities. So basically, a different kind of spam dominates now.

jjoonathan 4y ago
A different, more profitable kind of spam dominates now.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  A kind of spam from which Google profits because it often embeds its ads and/or analytics.
ricardo81 4y ago
>smaller Perhaps in other words, market forces (I'm thinking ROI) and economies of scale will win.
- tyingq 4y ago
  What I was talking about is that there was once a pretty large community of smaller SEO manipulators that did a lot of experimentation on what really worked. Especially in the "black hat" realm. Finding things like areas on big-brand sites that would accept user-generated content, comments, etc, where you could bypass some checks and insert links to sites. They would experiment in a pretty deep way, varying things like the rate of new links, type of new links, variations of anchor text / bare links, and so on. It USED to be very effective. The larger entities don't really have to be that detailed. If you have that brand power, you can just cut partnership/cross-link deals and pay a little attention to things like anchor text in links, contextual text around the link, etc. Edit: Ah, yeah, agreed. What got lost in all this was good content that had no big brand behind it. The indiscriminate hammer Google used to kill off small-guy SEO spam also pushed a lot of actually good stuff, stuff that never did any SEO at all, off the first page.
  - ricardo81 4y ago
    For sure. Way back any high Pagerank page linking to another would unequivocally boost the target site, whatever niche, but it's became more nuanced as you say. What I was meaning was, the players who can manipulate the link graph most cost effectively tend to rank better and it favours those with deeper pockets. Not so bad for competitive niches and high volume terms, but muddies the waters for many other things.
ge96 4y ago
Minor rant: I can't seem to contact an actual towing company directly, it's usually some external entity that ranks top in Google then they charge you more to find the actual local towing company. It says "Towing company in city name" but it's not local.
- tyingq 4y ago
  Yeah, their "local search" stuff seems to use yet a different set of criteria. You'll see similar complaints for other niches like locksmiths. Some set of SEO spammers has figured out how to use services like UPS-Store virtual addresses to fool Google.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  The same is true for me for contractors of any sort. Top links are frequently referral farms. For local search, I almost always use google maps instead. Maps search isn't perfect, but it beats web search hands down.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's really annoying - you have to dig around, and many business do not have a web presence at all so unless you can find something local with ads, you find nothing. Some tricks I've used in the past include local church bulletins (most parishes have some sort of a website and a weekly bulletin with advertising on the back), or local sport team sponsors, or local bars. For towing, you can also try calling a local dealership or auto repair.
  - elliekelly 4y ago
    Or their only web presence at all is a facebook page. I don't have a facebook account so this used to be mildly annoying but lately I've noticed it won't let me see at the page at all. I click the link to visit the business's "website" and I'm greeted with a full-page prompt to sign in to facebook.
b112 4y ago
There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam. "But wait!", you say, "there are some legit reviewers out there." Yes, there sure are, by my starement is accurate, because for every legit review site with aws referrals, there are tens of thousands of ml created spam referral sites. And so the real review sites are often lost in the mix regardless, which makss arguments to keep those results pointless. But google leaves them there, and this is the same sort of site which, if it were an email, would immediately end up in a spam folder. And beyond this, the other part of the problem is their ridiculous aliasing of search terms, which helps spammy sites come back as a response. You say google lost? It's not losing, if you just don't care. Frankly, it's just a return on investment thing. As long as only a few people per tens of thousands bolt, why spend the r&d?
- gfd 4y ago
  I put Amazon referral links on my technical blog whenever it's a hardware project. So far I have made < $5 on it so I should probably remove them. But for others I think it helps justify the time I spent writing up the blog and doing the project.
- blowski 4y ago
  > There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam. This is the root of the problem. If Google targets the low-hanging fruit, the spammers will very quickly find a workaround. Google is trying - and failing - to use more sophisticated signals. Spam is a virus. Google beneffited from the network effect, eradicating all opposition. But, like a European medieval monarch, it now has a poor immune system because of its lack of genetic diversity. The many, many SEO spammers are constantly experimenting, and they only have to find one flaw in Google's algorithm for it to win and spread quickly. Google's monoculture cannot save us, however hard they try.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    If you target the spam business model, it won't route around it. But yeah, a healthy set of search engines will get us better results.
FinalBriefing 4y ago
Blog farms are way too popular now, too. People have figured out how Google recognizes "meaningful content", and they generate blog posts and pages with AI and ghost writers to pump out vaguely helpful articles.
narrator 4y ago
They downranked pirated content results in 2018[1] so someone could just use pagerank and include those sites and have a better search engine for that sort of content. There's also the "controversial twiddler"[2] which makes Google only present mainstream opinions on various topics. I had to search yandex.com to even find a good article on it. There's some weird stuff on the Youtube blacklist, like the Las Vegas mass shooting from a few years ago that everyone forgot about that they never figured out the motive for. See the leaked "YouTube Blacklist" under the "Censorship" link in the project veritas article.[2] [1]https://fossbytes.com/google-downranks-65000-torrent-sites-industrys-fight-against-piracy-continues/amp/ https://fossbytes.com/google-downranks-65000-torrent-sites-i... [2]https://www.projectveritas.com/news/google-machine-learning-fairness-whistleblower-goes-public-says-burden-lifted-off-of-my-soul/ https://www.projectveritas.com/news/google-machine-learning-...

by tyingq 4y ago

jjoonathan 4y ago

A different, more profitable kind of spam dominates now.

Nextgrid 4y ago
A kind of spam from which Google profits because it often embeds its ads and/or analytics.

ricardo81 4y ago

>smaller Perhaps in other words, market forces (I'm thinking ROI) and economies of scale will win.

tyingq 4y ago
What I was talking about is that there was once a pretty large community of smaller SEO manipulators that did a lot of experimentation on what really worked. Especially in the "black hat" realm. Finding things like areas on big-brand sites that would accept user-generated content, comments, etc, where you could bypass some checks and insert links to sites. They would experiment in a pretty deep way, varying things like the rate of new links, type of new links, variations of anchor text / bare links, and so on. It USED to be very effective. The larger entities don't really have to be that detailed. If you have that brand power, you can just cut partnership/cross-link deals and pay a little attention to things like anchor text in links, contextual text around the link, etc. Edit: Ah, yeah, agreed. What got lost in all this was good content that had no big brand behind it. The indiscriminate hammer Google used to kill off small-guy SEO spam also pushed a lot of actually good stuff, stuff that never did any SEO at all, off the first page.
- ricardo81 4y ago
  For sure. Way back any high Pagerank page linking to another would unequivocally boost the target site, whatever niche, but it's became more nuanced as you say. What I was meaning was, the players who can manipulate the link graph most cost effectively tend to rank better and it favours those with deeper pockets. Not so bad for competitive niches and high volume terms, but muddies the waters for many other things.

ge96 4y ago

Minor rant: I can't seem to contact an actual towing company directly, it's usually some external entity that ranks top in Google then they charge you more to find the actual local towing company. It says "Towing company in city name" but it's not local.

tyingq 4y ago
Yeah, their "local search" stuff seems to use yet a different set of criteria. You'll see similar complaints for other niches like locksmiths. Some set of SEO spammers has figured out how to use services like UPS-Store virtual addresses to fool Google.
zdragnar 4y ago
The same is true for me for contractors of any sort. Top links are frequently referral farms. For local search, I almost always use google maps instead. Maps search isn't perfect, but it beats web search hands down.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bombcar 4y ago
It's really annoying - you have to dig around, and many business do not have a web presence at all so unless you can find something local with ads, you find nothing. Some tricks I've used in the past include local church bulletins (most parishes have some sort of a website and a weekly bulletin with advertising on the back), or local sport team sponsors, or local bars. For towing, you can also try calling a local dealership or auto repair.
- elliekelly 4y ago
  Or their only web presence at all is a facebook page. I don't have a facebook account so this used to be mildly annoying but lately I've noticed it won't let me see at the page at all. I click the link to visit the business's "website" and I'm greeted with a full-page prompt to sign in to facebook.

b112 4y ago

There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam. "But wait!", you say, "there are some legit reviewers out there." Yes, there sure are, by my starement is accurate, because for every legit review site with aws referrals, there are tens of thousands of ml created spam referral sites. And so the real review sites are often lost in the mix regardless, which makss arguments to keep those results pointless. But google leaves them there, and this is the same sort of site which, if it were an email, would immediately end up in a spam folder. And beyond this, the other part of the problem is their ridiculous aliasing of search terms, which helps spammy sites come back as a response. You say google lost? It's not losing, if you just don't care. Frankly, it's just a return on investment thing. As long as only a few people per tens of thousands bolt, why spend the r&d?

gfd 4y ago
I put Amazon referral links on my technical blog whenever it's a hardware project. So far I have made < $5 on it so I should probably remove them. But for others I think it helps justify the time I spent writing up the blog and doing the project.
blowski 4y ago
> There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam. This is the root of the problem. If Google targets the low-hanging fruit, the spammers will very quickly find a workaround. Google is trying - and failing - to use more sophisticated signals. Spam is a virus. Google beneffited from the network effect, eradicating all opposition. But, like a European medieval monarch, it now has a poor immune system because of its lack of genetic diversity. The many, many SEO spammers are constantly experimenting, and they only have to find one flaw in Google's algorithm for it to win and spread quickly. Google's monoculture cannot save us, however hard they try.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  If you target the spam business model, it won't route around it. But yeah, a healthy set of search engines will get us better results.

FinalBriefing 4y ago

Blog farms are way too popular now, too. People have figured out how Google recognizes "meaningful content", and they generate blog posts and pages with AI and ghost writers to pump out vaguely helpful articles.

narrator 4y ago

They downranked pirated content results in 2018[1] so someone could just use pagerank and include those sites and have a better search engine for that sort of content. There's also the "controversial twiddler"[2] which makes Google only present mainstream opinions on various topics. I had to search yandex.com to even find a good article on it. There's some weird stuff on the Youtube blacklist, like the Las Vegas mass shooting from a few years ago that everyone forgot about that they never figured out the motive for. See the leaked "YouTube Blacklist" under the "Censorship" link in the project veritas article.[2] [1]https://fossbytes.com/google-downranks-65000-torrent-sites-industrys-fight-against-piracy-continues/amp/ https://fossbytes.com/google-downranks-65000-torrent-sites-i... [2]https://www.projectveritas.com/news/google-machine-learning-fairness-whistleblower-goes-public-says-burden-lifted-off-of-my-soul/ https://www.projectveritas.com/news/google-machine-learning-...