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It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are apparently allergic to having
by adhesive_wombat 3y ago
It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are apparently allergic to having a human ever decide anything ever. It's just that if I were them, with an infinite data lake to find the vendors' traces, trillion-dollar C-suite morals and the SEO was messing with the bottom line, there would be no quarter when a nest is uncovered. Delist everything to do with them, delete all their accounts and salt their persistent data profiles. Most of them are abroad and will struggle to do anything about it. After all, occasional Gmail or Android developer bans are meted out with various levels of capriciousness.
I guess it's good that they're not obviously going Judge Dredd left, right and centre, but it's still surprising to me that you can run up to them, slap them in the virtual face and stay online to do it again.
Or perhaps it is not messing with the short-term bottom line because the SEO sites are crawling with ads? And until ChatGPT what were you going to do? Use Bing?
- qvrjuec 3y agoIsn't this what happened with rap genius around a decade ago[0]? Maybe this was long before their policy of zero human intervention. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/25/5243716/rap-genius-plummets-in-google-results-apologizes-for-spammy-seo https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/25/5243716/rap-genius-plumm...
- spookie 3y agoTheir lengthy apology is.... I don't know how to describe it. It reminds me of relationship I had, in a bad way. The part where they go on to say "We messed up" cracked me up. You don't "mess up" when you are fully aware of your actions, and perform them as planned.
- arp242 3y agoI kind of understand their "yeah, but other sites are doing the same shady shit". You can say that doesn't excuse it, and it kind of doesn't, but you're at a real competitive disadvantage if you don't participate in the arms race. It's bringing a knife to a gunfight.
- Nition 3y agoI notice the article says Hacker News first brought it to Google's attention![0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658
- spookie 3y agoThey'll only start noticing when it's too late. For now, I assume, the bling is still flowing enough to be as addictive to them as the SEO spam is for most.
- Nextgrid 3y agoSEO doesn't mess with the bottom line though. If anything, it could improve the bottom line by making the ads look more attractive if the organic search results have all been polluted to hell.
- fy20 3y agoUnpopular opinion: Without SEO polluting the algorithm, ads would be worthless, as the search algorithm would do a good enough job of finding the correct results.
- dboreham 3y ago> SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring... That could be because their interests are aligned. Google makes money from ad spend, not from delivering useful results to users.
- golergka 3y agoA lot of "SEO shenaniganery" is basically "make your website better, for robots and for users".
- qup 3y ago"This website made good use of H1s and captioned all its photos. Obliterate it."