One of my side projects is battling on a difficult keyword. It's going up and made it to top 5 after 3 years. I'm monitoring SEO using ahrefs. 1 year ago I saw a new website going to top position (grammarchecker.net) out of nowhere so I got interested in finding out their "story".
Domain was new, never saw that website when I researched my competition and it was on top positions on multiple keywords. The tool itself is nothing but a wrapper to `languagetool`, stuff that you can see on hundreds of other websites starting from page 2 in search results.
Digging through the data I was amazed to discover that he's basically running xrummer to comment on all the possible blogs and forums out there, on discussions and topics completely unrelated to the target website so yeah 2000's hacks are still valid. 1 year passed and he's still above me.
How are they unable to detect a comment spam towards a new domain? Blog posts spammed to death with thousands of unrelated comments that even my 8 year old could spot.
It is even worse because there are multiple victims - You lose your place in search, people searching get bad results, and people trying to run a forum or any site where there is user content get crushed with SEO spam.
Also note, this guy could be using PBN's, most people who build PBN block the SEO tools(Ahrefs, Majestic, SEMRush, Moz) spider user agents for looking at their site.
Also, he only has 585 referring domains compared to 748k backlinks, so the majority of his backlinks are sitewide backlinks.
Nofollow's are still relevant. If 100% of your backlinks are dofollow, then that's going to look unnatural, and you will be more likely to receive a Google penalty.
Nofollow links aren't going to pump up your stats, but they are vital to diversifying your backlink profile.
You see all those xrummer blog comment links and forum links out there... but that does NOT mean that it's helping. Most likely those links are just there to hide the links that are actually helping the site rank. That's typically done in cases such as the one you're describing. If you can spot it, Google can spot it and just ignores those links.
Wow polluting the internet to protect your Golden Goose sites for backlinks.. I usually expect the worst but this wasn't on my radar. It seems very plausible however.
My understanding is that they used to damage your ranking, but then people realized that spamming links to competing sites was an easy way to improve your ranking, so Google stopped.
I've also noticed that comment spam seems to actually work, and have seen mention that nofollow links do contribute to pagerank, although I'd guess they'd contribute less than follow links.
'I've also noticed that comment spam seems to actually work..'
My pet theory is that with any filter there is always some stuff that gets through and if you're automatically spamming a few thousand comments then even a tiny percentage is going to make it worth the effort.
There is also a chance they'll get a few comments on sites with dofollow links, of which there are still some around.
Dofollow and nofollow don't matter as much as the did a few years ago. It will look like unnatural link building if 100% of your backlinks are dofollow.
There's usually a intial period where sites with zillions of spammy backlinks will rank, then they will crash after a weeks /months and will probably never resurface again.
I believe part of the challenge is that if all those unrelated comments sank the domain ... then I could also sink YOUR domain by running xrummer as a weapon against you (creating useless link bait comments). How can Google avoiding weaponizing some of these kind of things?
As a legit biz trying to win legit links, this is such a hassle to deal with.
Perhaps even worse is the rise of "barely legal" blogs... (though these may be the same thing as PBN I suppose), but, by these, I mean, sure, they're original content, original "reviews," and "legitimate" blogs.
But the articles are pumped out en masse, often written in sub-par English, with nothing more than re-wording of a reviewed site's "about us" page. (Perhaps they're even training Markov models on reviewed sites' content?) But they increasingly dominate searches, particularly in the B2B and B2C tech space.
Do these serve customers' search intent? They're simple gateway pages: the content is often not really "readable." But since Google favors "reviews" and pages that link to many other top 10 SERPs, they dominate, vs legit product pages.
Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists. Just endless lists of "alternatives to X," and "rankings of XYZ products" (with next to no legit reviews), or "here's the stack this company uses." All designed to get widespread long tail links.
Google has become significantly less useful for me lately because of this. It’s like a distributed content farm.
Stack Overflow is terrible for it. More often than not the whole first page becomes a bunch of links to the same original SO post, just hosted in different places with different ads on top.
I’m not sure DDG and alternatives are any better, just because of the pure amount of noise that exists on the internet to beat google at their game.
Ugh. These stack overflow scrapers are so frustrating. "This link isn't purple yet, I haven't clicked on it." So I click on it and bam in my fatigue I realize half way through it's the same thing I saw five minutes ago with tweaked search terms.
OpenAI recently demonstrated a frighteningly high quality text generator[1] which leaves me concerned about the future.. humanity of the web - no more of those sub-par English articles if a bot writes for you.
Makes me think we'll inevitably see large tracts of the web near-fully automated - information gathering (research) and text generation (writing) for articles based on a simple prompt for that spark of creativity.
Next ten years sure will be interesting on the web.
Internet is really turning into a low trust society... I guess network sites with only your friends will become more important then. With probably even bigger niche conspiracy and antivaxx bubbles then now..
Why do people care whether a human or a bot wrote a comment / draw a picture / developed software.. ? The only relevant metric is the quality of the comment / picture / software, isn't it?
Because humans are social creatures. Talking to a bot, even an incredibly accurate one, isn't the same.
Tech like deepfakes or generated text is going to require us all to cryptographically sign content in the future. I foresee a time where white house press releases must be signed by the president just to confirm its real content.
That doesn't quite solve the problem unfortunately. If this is the only solution then the subject of some content can repudiate it by not signing it, even if it did actually happen.
For example if the president was filmed saying something in public he later wanted to deny, he could just claim it was faked. The person who filmed it could sign it, but who are they and what authority do they have to claim that they didn't fake it?
I've wondered if I should make a Reddit where everyone proves their ID, maybe even with a video so it's a lot harder to fake, so everyone can only have one account, and you'd know they aren't people working for the Russian government or whatever.
To an extent you're right - for the purposes of learning something for example, a bot can fulfill your needs if, say, it happens to fetch the right information and relay it to you, even if it's spam.
Although a comment like what I just wrote would require some logical deduction if it hasn't appeared on the internet before.
Like your XKCD comic, want to write an undetectable comment bot? Make artificial information fetching (like Google assistant) and add semantic reasoning and logical deduction.
... We'll invent general AI just to get users to click links to "Top 27 hair brushes for curly hair"
(Also, I guess someone could write a bot to find questions in comments, ask Google for the "according to Wikipedia" answer and copy it in, then slip in a "btw visit my site for top 12 hats you should buy if you like Pokemon go")
That is turning out to be one of the most misguided xkcd comics ever.
The problem is that bot traffic is virtually definitionally not neutral; it is trying to attempt some goal, overt or covert. That might be advertising, link farming, submarine placement, karma whoring (to some later use), vulnerability probing (if only for anti-bot defences), information gathering, or various forms of propaganda: disinfo/misinfo, instigation, or just overwhelming channels with noise (the Chinese model). Even putatively benign and declared bot rapidly become at best annoyances as experiences on Reddit and Mastodon are showing. Good bot practices require very judicious and closely administered use. Wikipedia and IRC service and janitorial bots are examples of positive use. Each is controlled and deployed by specific administrators.
I've seen and reported appearance of covert bot accounts across multiple networks. They never prove benign.
All of these reduce the human-to-human trust of a network -- the presumption that a given interaction is with an actual human, absent grossly obvious ulterior motives.
As a few others have noted, excessively mediated experiences seem to become lower rather than higher trust, a characteristic I've suspected for some time is a generalised case, with some possibly exceedingly deep cultural and sociological implications.
This rapidly veers off into my own hypothesis and theories, but; looking back at histories of communications technology and practice, particularly over the past 200 years or so, the practice of imprved coms is parallelled by routinised and standardised formats, and far less obsequious and religious language. (See especially research by James Beniger and JoAnne Yates on commercial and business communication). As comms latencies fell (from weeks or months to days or minutes, or less), the need to specifically prove and swear allegiance, loyalty, thankfulness, and debt in every exchange falls.
I also suspect (though I've found no discussion) that a major role of empirical religious traditions, which every major preindustrial empre seems to have had, is building a shared social trust basis. This would be a social mechanism of religion.
Other interesting observations are that it was the greek god Hermes represented trade, merchants, commerce, roads ... and thieves and trickery. It was as the first high-spped comms networks (telegraph) and motorised highway system emerged (Mississippi steam-powered river boats) that the idea of the confidence man emerged in Herman Melville's novel of the same name. The elements of distant communications, and speedy entry and exit, create the space required for fraud.
A different tack is taken by Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome, looking at the co-emergence of disease, epidemics, and plague with both urban density and high-volume (for the time) trade, commerce, and travel. Though he doesn't touch on fraud.
The whole question of how and why high- and low-trust cultures develop is an interesting one.
Computer-generated content has been around for a long time... and I even tested creating websites with auto generated content in the 1990s. It's nothing new.
Honestly, that'd probably be better than some of the blogs you see in Google's results at the moment. At least the sample text provided there was readable.
> Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists
These drive me nuts. I wish there was a way to incorporate trusted users flagging sites like this. I'm sure there's technical issues with it, but ideally it would let you "hide results from this site" to both keep them from popping up _and_ serve as a flag against the site.
I don’t know, maybe it’s expected that the legit businesses pay for advertising?
It’s not like people going to switch to Goggle’s competition.
Excuse my cynicism, it’s just that I can no longer find quality content/service/product in Google, I am over reliant on social media for discovering new things but apparently Google’s businesses is doing great.
That's what I figured about Facebook and Google. As a (new) firm. You are supposed to pay. And make it as hard as possible to get visibility. (the natural way)
Poor english skills are often a stronger indicator that the content is genuine. Search Twitter for a trending hashtag as an example. The vast majority of people in this world can't string words together real good.
Companies "reviewing" their competitors, or at the very least, trying to tag on to their SEO is something I'm seeing a lot of lately. I just don't think most people, when they search for "[product] review" want to hear from the main competitor of said product. Some companies are even sketchier about it, by setting up separate domain names to appear that they are separate.
I'm at the point where I now try to explicitly search sites like Reddit or Quora as Google seems to be full of so much trash and bias / affiliate spam before you find what you want.
To be honest, PBN's are nowhere near as effective as they were a couple of years ago. The chance of getting a manual action against your site is a lot higher.
If you were going to drop a few thousand dollars on buying backlinks, you don't want to have your site de-indexed by Google in 6 months without getting an ROI.
Non-English versions of Google are more linens and are still easy to game for PBN's.
Also, all PBN's are not all created equally. Making sure the domain isn't dropped, different whois details/domain registrars/hosting providers. Also putting relevant links to sites other than what clients have paid for to make this look more legitimate.
Niches with big competition like Pharma/Gambling/Game Hacks/Lead Gen will continue to user PBN's, but bigger SEO's will be diversifying their link building portfolio by building more whitehat links like guest posts and then sending more questionable links like PBN's to them as a tier 2 backlink.
On that note, there's also a technique, forgot the name, but it's basically anti-SEO where they intentionally push a competitor's pages onto a PBN with the intent of getting it detected (and penalized) by Google.
Had a competitor do this to a site with a bunch of really weird porno links.
Kept happening for months. I'd disavow them, 10x as many would show up weeks later. Eventually I lost interest fighting and just stopped disavowing them.
There was never any penalty and from what I could tell the extra links actually helped our rankings! After about 18 months the links stopped. No clue what happened.
It's called negative SEO. There was a Google update that is a bit more lenient so your competitors can't negatively spam your site.
Unless your competitor had some serious dosh to mass spam your site on PBN's, they would most likely being using a tool like Xrumer or GSA where you can purchase a 100k backlink blast for as little as $5
Companies are actively engaging in negative SEO all the time too. My friend used to work at a shady SEO shop in Florida and they used it often. Their clients don’t seem to care how it gets there since they mostly pushing affiliate ads, not a sustainable long term business.
What you describe at the end isn't whitehat. Whitehat (according to Google, from what I can gather) is focusing on site experience and just ensuring search engines are facilitated in indexing.
True, building any sort of backlinks are aganist Google's ToS. But that doesn't mean legitmate don't do it. You just need to be smart about it and make sure it looks "natural" to Google.
I wonder why non-English versions of Google are behind on this (I agree that they are), surely much of the Google search algorithm is language independent?
Less data available in smaller market for the algorithms to work with, noise vs. signal ratio.
And it’s a snow balling effect, they still need to provide results to users, and with more spammy websites in a market the average website can get away with more dodgy tactics.
I agree they have to make adjustments, however factors such as number of backlinks from high DA sites, user dwell time on page, schema markup, meta data structure, https, domain age, mobile friendliness, page speed etc. don't require an understanding of language.
Search for "<my area> plumber" returns totally gamed results. Has for years. No idea why that obvious use case is so broken. My wife hired one and the plumber was useless so I investigated. I've found obvious spam nests of multiple sites with duplicate styling and nothing seems to have changed.
This is lead gen and is a big business. People will build generic white label websites and rank them for certain cities. They'll then put a toll free number on them and then contact legitmate contractors and charge them either a monthly rate or a fee per each call.
There's also companies like RingPartner that are referred to Pay Per Call networks and give you a unique phone number to promote and you get paid per call.
Ah yes, the home contracting industry is ripe for SEO due to so many long tail keywords. A project I'm not proud of managed to get 100M pages indexed (about 1% of Google at the time), all related to home contracting services. This was done with a combination of using mod_rewrite to manufacture unique URLs, creating a CMS platform, hiring students to write content, using natural linking algorithms, and some software to automate creating unique inbound links from wikis/blogs to deep URLs. Sad to see the same kind of thing can be done today. I regret not putting that effort towards something more productive, but when you're in advertising, the race to the bottom can be tempting.
I've been reporting things like this for years and never seen anything change for better. I'm not saying Google doesn't care, but it seems like they cannot tell apart signal from noise so they can't fix these scams.
Something like "[myarea] open locked door" can have Google ad bids in the range of 30$,so there may be money in there for Google not caring for quality organic results
> You can have all the merits in the world, but if people don't know about it then you're out of business.
With the rise of social media, this is about 20 years out of date. If you have a great product and 100 users, 1000 people are going to see glowing testimonials at zero cost.
I strongly disagree. You're thinking purely from a software point of view - advertising is still extremely useful for any kind of local business or startup.
Good pointer but...let’s try that. My guess is they stay online. Here’s a couple minutes of searching. All the same company. Google can’t even see the dupe content obvious to us:
Google aren’t even making ad money on this. It’s just crap content and really bad old-style spam. If they just required a business location it might help.
I did. I also told a real plumber what was going on so he could report it. Now I see he's doing it too, or at least a minor version with one page per area.
I've had my entire site cloned by scammers looking for content. I fought back by continuing to publish boring and ill-written posts that no one wants to read. That shut them down after a few months.
I don't know why they bothered. As this article notes, content is cheap. You can always find someone to write empty words for pennies. I can see no easy way for Google to combat this apart from boosting trusted sites.
One way to try to raise your PageRank is to submit your own articles to HackerNews, like whalabi just did. Nothing wrong with that - I've done it myself - but it didn't work for me.
Define "Trusted". What does "Trusted" mean? Originally the blue-check mark system was to say "This person that had the handle <X> is really <X>". Now it is more of a status symbol e.g. there are certain people that have had their check-marked removed because of what they have said on the platform. The same will happen, doesn't matter if the site is legitimate i.e. not a spammer, not someone that abuses the algorithm, but it will be due to the "content".
People these days are constantly under attack for what I call "wrong think crimes" is where they disagree on a particular issue (almost doesn't matter what it is) and then they are attacked constantly by groups of individuals who think they are morally superior as they are "thinking correctly".
Any "Trusted" site will be treated the same way. Google will be pressured by a group to remove the trusted status, due to whatever politics are in vogue at the time.
Isn't one of the key ranking factors time users spend on the page? Wouldn't poorly written / empty worded articles cause users to bounce quickly thus causing them to rank poorly?
> Isn't one of the key ranking factors time users spend on the page?
In the original PageRank? No.
These days, who knows? But Google only knows how long people stay on the page using Google Analytics and many sites (mine, for instance) don't use it.
I am a quick reader and are very good at quickly skimming articles. I hope Google doesn't rank pages based on time spent, since Google would be optimizing their search away from my preferences.
I researched Google's algorithm a while back and a a fairly strong ranking factor IS how long they spend on your page/site (whether you have GA or not) but that can backfire. (I know that Google's exact algorithm is unknown but it's based on experiments by SEO sites)
Here's how I understood it to work:
If a user finds you on a Google search and then clicks the link, Google times how long it takes for you to come back to the search results. So if you immediately backed out of the page they would take that as meaning the result was crap and they took that into account in their algorithm. The thinking being that it was an irrelevant result.
However, that counts against sites that provide the answer you want right at the top of the page so that when you open the page, the answer is staring you in the face... so obviously you are going to back out again as you have your answer.
This was from around two years ago when I was researching building an indexer and search engine for kicks so my memory of how it worked is fuzzy.
If only Google had a technology that would preload the top results (maybe coming from a Google CDN) and show them right on the search results page. I’d be AMP’ed for that.
Users may back out again once they have the answer, but they probably won't click on another search result. This should show Google that the user found their answer on that page.
Every google search result you see is masked to have a boat load of tracking that identifies you, your search query and a variety of other details. When you click out from Google you are first bouncing through Google's instant redirect before you are taken to the target website.
When users click the back button they bounce back through the redirect to the SERP.
You can test the tracking by right clicking and copy/pasting the URL of any Google search result. This can be stripped using add-ons (and I highly recommend it).
Yes, this was my understanding from a couple of years ago when I looked into it.
They know what time you clicked the link in the search results to go to page X. They also know when you hit the back button to come back to the search results.
My understanding was the faster you backed out meant the less-relevant the page was.
It was one of many factors in the ranking algorithm.
How does this track the "open a ton of tabs in the background from search and then cull them" workflow? Can they know which ones I actually spend time on vs eyeball and quickly close?
They can tell if you opened links in new tabs rather than by clicking on them sequentially, and can tell that you kept the search results live in its own tab for at least n seconds after opening tabs (x, y, z) in quick succession. Voodoo, err I mean ML, can deduce a lot from that.
It's really not. Google, famous for never giving users control over UX, has a full-blown option to persistently save your preference to always open search results in a new window/tab.
Google only knows how long people stay on the page using Google Analytics and many sites (mine, for instance) don't use it.
I think they also know if there are any ads hosted by google, or if the user is using chrome.
Depending on how moral they are, they could figure it out if the user is on android at all, or if the site has recaptcha, or if they're using google DNS, or if they have a partnership with the ISP, or if the site is loading fonts or javascript libraries from google servers, and probably some others that I can't think of off the top of my head.
I wonder if sometimes the opposite might happen. On occasion I will look something up and I find an article that is super long. Provides a lot of information anyone searching for this will already know and then bury the short answer at the end. At the same time if I find the question/answer on stackoverflow or Reddit it's super terse, I get exactly what I came for and am gone within seconds.
Google actually rewards putting the relevant short answer towards the top of the article. When you see those featured snippets in the results page, above the normal organic listings thats google giving a nod to pages that have served the searcher intent well and quickly. Often this featured snippet isn't even from the position 1 result. It offers a nice opportunity for pages with less relative ranking strength to get to the top in a way they otherwise might not be able to do.
I'm guessing it has something to do with how quickly the user returned back to the search results. For example, you're searching for something specific and click on the #1 result. If you visit site #1, go back to the results, click on #2 then visits to #1 could be seen as a "bounce". Of course this could theoretically be gamed, but that's for another discussion.
Yet another reason I'm glad I don't use Chrome. As for the ad network, I would not be surprised if there's a lot more information being gleaned from it, but it makes sense they would want to tie it back to search if possible.
I just assume everything, hence why I don't use it. Paranoid much? Maybe, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong ;-) Knowing the ethos of Google, I don't trust it any further than I can throw it.
According to a comment in this thread: "They also know when you hit the back button to come back to the search results", so I guess they can determine roughly how long you spent on a page?
They are not called “dropped domains”, the term used more often is “expired domains”. The author doesn’t even mention how registrars are a player and part of this, as they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are dropped.
Google has done a lot since 2011 to identify pbns and take them down. This article seems a bit outdated.
Agreed. Also the forum he's referencing to is BlackHatWorld for those curious.
It's well known that some of the sellers on there are artificially inflating their views and replies, and a few of the top sellers are probably using hacked logins to write reviews (their database was leaked a few years ago: https://hacked-emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhat...)
Their job is to automatically distribute content on fake blogs and fake social media profiles, not too far out to think they do the same with their own services, pumping them with comments from fake profiles.
The first post on the first page of that thread is an interesting read, what a way to market your services.
> They are not called “dropped domains”, the term used more often is “expired domains”.
Well they obviously are if they're called something else more frequently. But I've heard them called both, interchangeably with equal frequency. I think this is a bit nitpicky
> they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are dropped.
A domain goes through various stages before it becomes available for registration again. They are auctioning them after expiration but before general availability.
The thing is, this mostly stopped being relevant about 2ish years later circa 2013-2014. Google massively improved its ability to identify and penalize or discount these things.
You can still make effective PBNs to this day, but the cost to get them to pass the google sniff test is basically on par with just doing legitimate marketing, but carries additional risk.
Given that, most of the serious search marketers I know have long since abandoned these crappy tactics in favor of serving searcher intent and earning relevant links through smart content promotion and outreach. Folks who still buy and sell this stuff are mostly people who haven't updated their skills in a very long time, or those that prey on the same.
There are a large number of effective tactics available, but really you have to pick and choose them based on the niche/budget/funnel position/search intent/search features of a particular query/ect.
Some common example tactics include:
Broken Backlink Building:
Create high quality page, then look for pages that have historically served the same searcher intent and attracted backlinks but are now no longer available and reach out to sites that linked to that and offer them the newer resource to fix their broken link.
Skyscraper technique:
Make a list of similar pages that serve same search intent as a term or topic you are going after, sorted by relevance and links earned. Make a significantly better page, then reach out to webmasters linking to the other resource and suggest your better/more-up-to-date/relevant to readers link as an alternative.
Social Proof Pitch:
Before promoting your content to Journo's and Bloggers, try to get it to the top of a subreddit or the reddit homepage or otherwise demonstrate its popularity on other social networks. Then when you pitch it you can point to it likely being a useful resource. Also works if the thing you got to do well socially is a stub of a story and you offer to write in-depth about it or about an important part of a larger story as a guest post.
Citable elements:
Make otherwise hard-to-link-to pages like landing pages easier to link to by adding relevant citable elements (charts, graphs, facts & figures) that bloggers and journo's may wish to reference.
Unlinked Brand Mentions:
Set up alerts for any time your brand is mentioned. If you see one that isn't a link but a link would be relevant in the context of the article, ask the author to make the mention a link.
HARO / SourceBottle / Reporter Connection:
Make yourself available as a subject matter expert to reporters, and when giving expert quotes, reference deeper explanations in articles already present on your site.
Reverse Guest Post:
Pay or entice industry authority/influencer to write something on your site to attract additional eyeballs to your other content.
Topical Interviews / Industry Round-ups / Guest Speaking ( podcasts, video, conferences):
Go places where relevant audiences already exist and get them interested in hearing more from you.
Get Friendly with Pirates:
Use copyscape or reverse image search to find people who are using your content or images without proper attribution. Instead of sending take-down requests, ask that they credit, with a link the source and or do a cross domain rel canonical to the original content.
And so on, and so forth. Good Search marketers have a wide variety of tactics at their disposal. Great search marketers will only apply the relevant ones rather than trying to offer clients one-size-fits all strategies.
Edit: A lot of these are much easier with the help of some tools like ahrefs, semrush, pitchbox/buzzstream, hunter.io and the like.
Brian Dean as far as I know didn't invent anything I listed above, with the exception I think of coming up with a name for the skyscraper technique. He has however done a great job over the years of collecting various tactics, strategies and research methods and publishing them in a nice digestible format.
I've been in the space since 2009 and most of what I know I learned via trial and error, just setting up test sites to see what works (see my linked video from 2011 for more on that). That said there is a really nice community in the SEO space with people eager to share whats worked for them or put their own spin on widely adopted tactics and strategies.
Off the top of my head I'd recommend Ahrefs (both their blog as well as their YouTube channel), Backlinko (that'd be Brian Dean), SEO by the Sea (mostly digging into google patents and trying to understand their implications for search), Moz, anything by Nick Eubanks, Cyrus Shepard, ViperChill, Ross Hudgens, Garret French or Jon Cooper.
One thing to keep in mind is a lot of stuff goes out of fashion pretty quickly. If you are reading a post about SEO from a few years ago, double check to make sure its still in line with best practices and effective. If it seems like a short-term tactic it's probably best avoided regardless. And above all else, don't assume because some SEO Guru said a thing is a thing that it is indeed a thing. Test everything. Google doesn't give a manual for how to rank and they make changes to the algorithm regularly, so everyone is making educated guesses. There are many schools of thought inside the SEO industry. When in doubt, test it out.
Thank you for the insights! One last question if you don't mind..
Have you ever paid for buying links? I know it is against Google's policy but SEO companies I talked to before I decided to learn it myself told me that 18 out of 100 links are paid links (with maybe 2 free links as every SEO guy is doing broken lb, etc so free links are mostly taken). They said they can even get me links from some pretty big sites if I had the budget for it.
A good example is the entire category of “Gardening”. The real content is nearly impossible to find and it’s completely full of blog spam and low quality generic content. The keywords must be valuable so it’s a good indicator of how bad google search has gotten.
And it's an uphill battle to teach "regular people" to not simply click one of the top links on Google and believe what it says. This is especially true for health and wealth topics.
Sadly, it seems most people cannot distinguish between content provided by people with a genuine interest and knowledge between "content" of no substance or authority.
A lot of the garbage content is designed to look like real content and it can often take 10-20 seconds to figure out that the generated content is just fluff and offers nothing new or useful. That’s probably long enough for google to accept it as good content.
In gardening this is especially true because one could simply copy the text on the back of a seed packet and add filler words to make a paragraph. For a lot of these types of topics and blogs google should really look at re-engagement scores.
How many many times the user comes back to the same page, how many times it’s bookmarked and how often the user views other content on the page.
That being said I think google is probably complicit in reducing search quality because doing so Allows them to present many times the number of ads. If it takes 20-30 websites and multiple searches to find a decent article on growing strawberries then they would have generated that much extra ad revenue. There isn’t an incentive to get search right, just right enough that they are better than bing and that’s not a hard metric to beat.
Most of these guys will making Amazon affiliate sites where they recommend products throughout their content and make comission when you click on the link.
What I notice is that Google routinely returns fairly random sites that simply take Wikipedia's content and game SEO so they show up for "wiki <term>." Those results come and go. Google clearly does a lot of customisation for particular concerns, given how important Wikipedia is, I'm surprised to see these occasional results.
One of my first freelancing gigs was for a guy who maintained one of these.
He peddled this pills and had built an impressive (by 2009 standards) network of 87 WP installs with generated crap in them that linked heavily with each other, all on this OVH instance and had managed to break one of the plugins he used for this purpose, so he posted a bid on GetAFreelancer, which I won and never saw a cent for.
I'm still really pissed about that for some reason.
A lot of search results in my native language return totally garbage results where clearly they just scraped for keywords and then threw them on a site. Another tactic is to Google Translate articles from other languages, which obviously ends with a totally unreadable post, but it still ranks well because it hits some keywords.
It's actually weird that these rank so high. The very least Google used to do well was to filter this garbage. I can understand them losing the SEO battle, but that they fail to filter straight-up spam is quite interesting.
The big G has gotten comfortable and complacent atop their throne.
Search quality has been on the decline for a while now, but in the past 3-6 months it's gotten really really bad for anything that isn't mainstream and popular.
I have more "showing results for XYZ, do you want to see results for your actual query QRS?" than just showing QRS.
Yeah, I do, that's why I typed it.
> 10 results for QRS. Still irrelevant and excluding words, even in quotes
The search team must have lost a lot of talent recently, it's amateur hour.
Years ago, I once googled my name to find someone with the same name in the UK who was a bit of a fluffy motivational speaker. I laughed, and forgot about him.
A few months later, I googled my name and all that came up were fluffy blog entries he wrote on various generic blogs. They were all slightly different. He pushed me off the front page.
Granted, I don't really care about being found online. (Just leads to too much spam, recruiters are the worst.) But, a few days later I happened to be on Google's campus and someone who tracked those things struck up a conversation with me. I politely pointed out the gimmick that the other person did.
Normally, I don't like pulling strings, but I certainly had the last laugh at that one!
Unless it was a general algorithmic change that took care of that, manually intervening in the Serps for personal favors would be completely against Google's stated rules. If possible (I have some doubts), it's probably a nice side gig for employees, since rankings are easily worth millions.
Interestingly enough my blog that had little traffic (at best 15000 page views and probably 2 or 3 comments per month) also had some posts cloned. Not even necessarily the most popular ones.
It's funny, we used to go to Dogpile or Jeeves when Yahoo's results were crap and you couldnt be bothered to go search Lycos, Altavista and dozen others (and all the hyper-specialized ones). Then Google hit the scene and it gave equal or better results than the aggregators.
Now Google themselves gives dodgy or inconsistent results that incentivize one to look elsewhere, but I don't think it is entirely their fault-- charlatans can crank out chum content faster than it can be analyzed and indexed. Google is doing the best the can...they have their own financial interests but they happen to align with ensuring people trust their results.
The scale and nature of the web these days is very different than it was in '96. There was a competing engine popping up every year-- an endless cycle of "___ sucks, use ___ instead."
But I haven't heard of anything other than Google and DDG since Cuil failed.
They would likely work in a similar way, being susceptible to the same tactics.
Imho, the main problem is that there's no deterrent. Even if you get caught doing some very black hat stuff, worst thing that can happen is to get a manual penalty. Remove the outlawed stuff, wait a month or two, submit a reinclusion request and you're back in business. If it was a "once you're caught, you're out for good" thing, SEOs would tread much more carefully.
I disagree that they'd work the same way because Google has invested millions of person-hours into a proprietary algorithm that they share with no one.
DDG and Bing often have wildly differing results for me.
That's true, but I believe that they'd arrive at similar techniques if they were rivaling Google. Today, it's a Cyborg-Behemoth vs a few scrap-yard tinkerers. If Bing & DDG had the budget and manpower Google has, the results would probably become more similar - but who knows, there might be completely different approaches to search that we just haven't seen.
In any case, we probably do agree that it would be very good in general if there was more competition in the search market.
Google is to blame as much as these people who are gaming their search.
The number one tip most SEO blogs cite these days is to use AMP. It can skyrocket a crummy site over a non AMP site with much better content for many trending keywords.
I find that this type of thing is equivalent to gaming the search results as it would be by doing low quality blogs. Just this time the hack is offered by the G itself.
I think they are boosting ranking for Google Aanalytics integrated sites with DoubleClick cookies running. If you remove or change analytics Google tanks your ranking. I ran experiments including google ads for a few months a couple of years ago. They set me up with an account manager who moved me to a new analytics account that added Doubleclick cookies. I've been trying to remove the advertising cookies since then and it's impossible from within the Analytics console. If I plug in a new Analytics account my SEO placement tanks. I feel like it's a racket that gives away my site's user data in exchange for rankings. Help!
It's definitely all about capital now. The algorithms are just not smart enough to make accurate judgements in such a competitive landscape... It might have worked a few decades ago when competition was low, but now the idea that an algorithm can outsmart an army of human SEO experts is ridiculous.
I wonder if things would be better if Google went back to the old approach of Yahoo which involved hiring humans to manually rank the pages (at least partially). I think search results would be significantly better.
Always. I had been in touch with this industry until 2010 and that was as easy (and profitable) as if it was a feature, intended this way. Later on, as far as I know, algorithms have changes a couple of times but that didn't change much, just minor inconvenience SEO guys routinely adapt to. If I didn't care about people's jobs and wasn't libertarian I'd say SEO should be outlawed.
It was possible years ago I think? Vaguely remember to having blocked experts-exchange, quora and other you-must-be-a-member-to-actually-see-the-content pages
If Google cared about this, they could fix it. They don't have an adequate system for checking business legitimacy. If they tried hard to filter out the domains that have no identifiable real-world business behind them, or which are way too publicized for their real world size, they could fix this.
So long as you use an algorithm to rank content, people will be able to reverse-engineer it and game Google Search results. Of course, without an algorithm I have no idea how they could possibly rank billions of web pages.
"As soon as you define a metric to measure a goal, the metric itself becomes the goal." I'm sure I'm mangling that quotation, but that's the phenomenon you're describing, or at least a close relative of it.
Over the last few months, I've had a thought that only very recently I've been able to put into words: it's more profitable to appear to be a source of truth than it is to actually be a source of truth.
This generalises. True value is expensive both to create and assess.
The tricksters arbitrage both sides of this exchange. -- the producers and consumers.
And yes, sometimes the deception may be in appearing to be something not valuable but instead high-risk: bluff threats, imitation of poisonous or stinging animals or insects, inflatable tanks.
i have learned that a lot of terms, specially ones worth money, have been gamed in google for almost a decade. it's really not hard to do at all. If i know i am searching for a competitive term, i will sometimes try bing instead. it has been gamed as well.
Domain was new, never saw that website when I researched my competition and it was on top positions on multiple keywords. The tool itself is nothing but a wrapper to `languagetool`, stuff that you can see on hundreds of other websites starting from page 2 in search results.
Digging through the data I was amazed to discover that he's basically running xrummer to comment on all the possible blogs and forums out there, on discussions and topics completely unrelated to the target website so yeah 2000's hacks are still valid. 1 year passed and he's still above me.
How are they unable to detect a comment spam towards a new domain? Blog posts spammed to death with thousands of unrelated comments that even my 8 year old could spot.