alt Hacker NewsI'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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The Google you remember from 2003 was murdered and its corpse is being worn by an entirely unrecognizable company.
Seriously, they tackled this years ago with the panda update to kill off all the how to and similar seo spam. It's like after around that time they just stopped caring at all and let the best X sites take over.
Just manually review top K websites and ban such garbage?
Sometimes dumb, bruteforce and biased solution can work way better than any automation you can come up with
> 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.
I miss Google of 2003
What would it take for someone to make it today? No AI, only 1 on mobile, and sites with heavy ad loads are punished
Searching for python documentation was the worst, geeks for geeks and others would get the top slot for reskinning the pypi docs with ads.
The entire thing was so blatant and obvious that I assumed Google did not care due to ad revenue.
When ChatGPT launched search, you could immediately skip over all the crap. It made search nice again.
Because it became an embarrassing news story (https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/, also mentioned in this article). They would have lazily left it unfixed if everybody weren't laughing at them.
>My memory is inside Google we were discussing this risk back in 2003, probably earlier.
Yeah but that was before they hired the incompetent grifter Prabhakar Raghavan and eventually made him head of Search.
The air purifier review site Housefresh dug into why sites like theirs were seeing less traffic back in the spring, and it amounts to a handful of companies buying up popular magazine/blog brands and using them as affiliate farms that cross-post to sites within their networks of brands to boost visibility:
https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/
On HN here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40239811
And their previous article mentioned in that post generated a lot of discussion on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451