I have little to no experience in SEO. Does Google have a history of weighing in on situations like this and manually penalizing bad actors? If so, I would love a link to read about.
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>Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google's webmaster quality guidelines. Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate our search index. Most issues reported here will result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual indication to the user.