I agree, though I think it's fair play to try and do things that the Google algorithm likes...but are not directly related to quality. Say somewhere in the bow

I agree, though I think it's fair play to try and do things that the Google algorithm likes...but are not directly related to quality. Say somewhere in the bowels of their ML pipelines, features that get scored include things like "has a favicon.ico and it's unique and not seen elsewhere". Well, then doing that isn't really fraud to me. It's just adding "proxies for quality" so you aren't dinged for not having them.