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1743 points caspii | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.262s | source
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superasn ◴[] No.27429148[source]
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.

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dafelst ◴[] No.27429517[source]
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

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Exuma ◴[] No.27429778[source]
Go on...
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1. meowster ◴[] No.27430267[source]
Nice try black hat SEO person :-)