The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

Google really needs to come up with a better way than backlinks to rank sites.

It's 2021 and surprisingly for all the billion dollar A.I. it can still be gamed with a bunch of unrelated links with little or no connection from the article to the site.

Also it's pretty unnatural and shady to get these backlinks. For my own SaaS site almost every blogger I contacted for a review just straight up asked me money in exchange for link. What the software did was of no consequence to this exchange. Most sites which have these "list of 10 XYZ" are just similar money making scams yet they rank so highly on Google.

P.S. And likewise I too get dozens of emails daily with "offers" from free article to actual dollar amounts just for putting a paid link. These SEO guys are just relentless because such shenanigans are working great at beating Google so far.

I don't think there are incentives for a change. The way it is done now is probably more profitable and the competition is doing exactly the same.

Backlinks are not as important as Google would have you think, they are a pretty weak ranking factor except in the deep tail of the web.

Google (and others) keep up the narrative that they're important so that black and grey hat SEO folks keep focusing effort in the wrong places.

Source: ran the web spam detection team on a different well known search engine

That is certainly eye opening and it's really amazing news. Hopefully in future the rankings could be fairly decided on usefulness and merit than who can buy or trick the most links.

Anyway so how would you explain the rankings of sites in this article? I thought all that was going for these guys were just the insane amount of links pointing to their site.

Go on...

>Most sites which have these "list of 10 XYZ" are just similar money making scams yet they rank so highly on Google.

I was just talking to my SO about this the other day when we were trying to find an air purifier for allergies. I'm the kind of person that likes to compare products a ton before dropping more than about ~$100 on anything. The way the internet has become in the last 10-15 years has made this increasingly more difficult. You really have to dig to find in-depth unbiased content on anything someone stands to make money from. For every 1 good review there are 100 'top 10 best ranked' blogspam sites..

Like the backlink spammers on the article, which are winning?

but yea "narrative"

Nice try black hat SEO person :-)

If you think about it, these are the "money searches". It's crazy they didn't try harder to solve people's needs instead of regurgitating that careless spam.

Google collects immense of data about people's actual visits. Backlinks used to be a proxy for how authoritative things were You don't need the proxy when you have the record of where people actually visit.

Interesting, but this does not seem to match empirical evidence by the likes of Ahrefs, which suggests that links are by far the most important ranking factor.

Heh, I struggle figure out what is a real review and what is a paid for ad. It's sad to the point where I've pretty much given up because of the sheer amount of time it would take to do the research. Instead I opt to go for Amazon's competitors (e.g. Currys and Argos for us in the UK) and pick something there. They're a little more vetted, and less likely to be knock off or something.

That's very effective for the top results. But if legit sites cannot rank in the first spots they'll get orders of magnitude fewer visits than the scam sites that employ SEO hacks to get the first places.