Google SEO Spam

Google's ability to surface useful results has been thoroughly defeated by SEO spammers. To a lesser extent, the same is true of other search engines (Bing, etc.) though Google is the foremost SEO spam target for obvious reasons. Given that state of things, there is some sense in promoting more user-friendly pages that are thus a bit less likely to be SEO spam.

Nice way of looking at the problem of google search and the SEO spammers.

The article overlooks that "ads" goes beyond just ads on the search results page. Ads is the main problem, in the form of Google's business model which dissuades them from actually improving search result quality.Spam/SEO/etc sites are very easy to detect - use the presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links, newsletter signup forms, etc as a negative ranking signal, and the problem will be resolved quickly. This can't be evaded, because the same techniques used

The adage "cock-up over consipiracy" comes to mind when reading this. What the author implies is that Google is knowingly keeping spam sites in their results so as to profit from them. Google is still the largest player in search by a good margin, so I suspect it is more the case that spammers are targeting their SEO spammy skills to Google's algorithm, and google just fails to withstand the onslaught.

Google puts resources into reducing spam and does reduce spam, so it would be even worse than it is if Google didn't do anything. The author's troubles may be side effects of some of the things Google does at scale to filter out spam.

Google puts a _lot_ of effort into avoiding SEO spam, but it's a red queen problem.

I think Google became altavista and spam is too easy. Maybe sth like kagi can mitigate it.

My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.

No, Google is being gamed. If you follow the money, e.g. AdSense, Affiliate Links, you will eventually disincentivize SEO spam.

The problem, IMO, might be the monoculture we have around search. Because Google is soo big, it's enough for spammers to target it and they have the vast majority of the search visibility. If we had better, more diverse competition, that might manifest as a tradeoff, presumably, they would have competing and diverse criteria so you would probably not be the top result on _all_ dominant search engines. SEO spam needs upkeep and attention to latest algos, else it decays. Competing algos would