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Google stops letting sites like Forbes rule search for "Best CBD Gummies"

(arstechnica.com)
214 points pseudolus | 3 comments | 20 Nov 24 21:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.636s | source
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NelsonMinar ◴[20 Nov 24 23:59 UTC] No.42199494[source]▶
I'm confused about how or why this is a new policy. My memory is inside Google we were discussing this risk back in 2003, probably earlier. Search quality was on it. I just assumed they'd lost the arms race, or that the parasites' ranking was justified for other reasons that were hard to tease apart. What are they doing new now?

I think often about Mahalo, the sleazy shovel content that was spamming the web back in 2007. Google shut that down somewhat fast, although it did take several years. These days with AI and more aggressive spammers it's a losing battle. The real problem is the financial incentives that make this kind of spamming profitable in the first place.

My tiny little blog gets about 3 requests a week for someone to "pay me to run a guest article". Going rate is $50-$200 and again, my blog is tiny.

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mjr00 ◴[21 Nov 24 00:06 UTC] No.42199551[source]▶
> I'm confused about how or why this is a new policy.

My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.

> The real problem is the financial incentives that make this kind of spamming profitable in the first place.

Yeah, but the financial incentives exist on both ends. There's a gross symbiotic relationship between Google and SEO spammers, because Google also owns the ad network the spammers put on their page. If Google puts ad-laden SEO blogspam as the top result and a user clicks it, the user sees a bunch of ads from Google. Everyone wins: Google, the SEO spammers, and advertisers. Well, everyone except the user, but who cares about them?

My guess/hope is that ChatGPT has made someone who actually cares about the quality of search results actually step in and say things have gone too far.

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1. nurumaik ◴[21 Nov 24 00:54 UTC] No.42199902[source]▶
> Google wins

Define "wins". From what happening right now, it seems that google may lose much more than it earned by aligning with seo spammers

Maybe they need to start locking employee stock options for 100 years to prevent them optimizing short-term gains?

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2. johnnyanmac ◴[21 Nov 24 01:02 UTC] No.42199950[source]▶
Google's only taking the greedy approach. Spam sites on top, spam sites use google adsense, people click spam sites, they click google ads.

It works great, until it doesn't. But that's a problem for the next CEO.

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3. Scoundreller ◴[21 Nov 24 03:16 UTC] No.42200753[source]▶
iunno, I used to rank pretty well for things in my country like "$company's tech support number". Unlike every $company, my page had a nice clean URL like whatever.tld/Tech-Support-Number-for-$company and I'd just list of their phone numbers with a few paragraphs about how $company is shit. Maybe 50kb total.

Meanwhile $company's page was company.tld/234897234982-029823749823742-2340823492 and 3 pages down was a phone number if your browser didn't choke on the javascript.

For ISP ones, I recommended people print a copy so they can call if they can't get on the internet, which kinda backfired when a major ISP changed their tech support number (!) and it redirected to a toll-free squatter's sex chat line.

Turns out $company really hates it when you call their call (cost) centres.

I had maybe 50 pages for our different oligopolies and averaged $500/month revenue on adsense, so GOOG's cut was $250/month.

Today, for one $company, the first 9 results are different pages from $company.tld, each unhelpful with a phone number in their own way, and they don't run adsense!