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Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual
- jaronilan 2y agoOT: earlier this year I wrote a short fictional story about SEO…. https://github.com/jaronilan/stories/blob/main/Duplicitous.pdf https://github.com/jaronilan/stories/blob/main/Duplicitous.p...
- arjvik 2y agoWow, love the story, still processing it
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- fueloil 2y ago[flagged]
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- nothercastle 2y agoJust goes to show you how far behind the SEO scammers Google is. Despite being bigger and wealthier Google simply can’t catch the more nimble SEO scammers
- wkat4242 2y agoI'm pretty sure Google is milking them now by just selling ad words, they no longer care about the search results, just how much money they make
- Drakim 2y agoWhat you are saying sounds like hyperbole, but all it takes is for the management within google to blindly chase metrics and they end up doing exactly that.
- Nextgrid 2y agoThat's the point - willingly saying that they promote spam sites to milk ad revenue could land them in antitrust trouble. But all they have to so is merely not do anything that would downrank said spam sites, and the outcome is exactly the same yet they are now legally in the clear and can just blame incompetence for the (totally predictable) outcome.
- bootloop 2y agoI mean that is exactly what each and every Google team does. There is no decision being made without having the data "supporting" it. But every graph can be shown nicely and things which are common sense don't need a metric to proof it.
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- arresin 2y agoAlso SEO provides at least something for the long tail. My belief is that the algorithm is able to predict what looks like “content” to a broad consumer base. Then the fatter the tail gets the more they manually tweak the results (like editors doing publishing).
- equestria 2y agoI doubt it works this way. People at Google use search too, and they don't like what they see. Part of the problem is that they're fighting against financial incentives that they themselves created. There's plenty of upside and little downside to abusing it, so it's just endless whack-a-mole. Another issue is just how bureaucratic the process has become. They want it to look good to the regulators and the courts, so they put up with a pattern of abuse for five years, then announce some well-reasoned but narrow policy change (e.g. "product reviews now need to be actual hands-on reviews"), and... a month later, spammers are just adding an extra lie on all the fake review websites.
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- hinkley 2y agoIt’s getting harder and harder for me to find real answers on Google. For a little while DDG was doing okay but they seem to be just as bad if not worse now.
- vtodekl 2y ago[dead]
- vtodekl 2y ago[dead]
- greenchair 2y agogeo location trick is absolutely fascinating!
- Nextgrid 2y agoAnd also absolutely trivial to detect automatically. The fact that Google doesn't do it proves they don't give a shit about improving search quality beyond superficial efforts whose main objective is just to make it look like they do. Maybe the fact that most spam sites have Google Analytics & Ads has something to do with it?
- Macha 2y agoI mean spammers can (and do) get more fancy with e.g. detecting the source AS and its owner for cloaking, but I guess the spammers here are using geo location for a veneer plausible deniability that they're not specifically targeting Google.
- sneak 2y agoYou can’t prove a negative.
- ryukoposting 2y agoOff the top of my head, the most trivial approach is also trivial to defeat. Google sets up a VPN? Just give its IP address special treatment just like you're already doing with the geofencing trick. The only thing I can think of that'd be tough to deal with is giving that VPN server a second route to the internet, and hiding that behind the biggest consumer CG-NAT you can find. They'll have to use a bogus UA string too. To be fair, it's well within Google's capabilities. I'm surprised they don't already do something like this, honestly. Trivial? I wouldn't say so. On a related note: between SEO abuse like this, and the ongoing systematic IP theft by OpenAI, Google, and friends, I worry we're entering an irreversible dark age for the web. Crazy abuses of NAT and UA strings will run rampant, and the only solution will be to serve nothing of value to anyone at all without a paywall.
- nisa 2y ago
- throwaway743 2y agoSo sick of dealing with Google, between this, the play store, admob, etc. They'll punish you for the slightest things, have zero meaningful customer service/means of recourse, and in many cases don't have a way to even reach out to customer service (admob's email option is visible but throws an error every time you click it). Not to mention, they try to steer you towards their useless "community forums" that sre filled with "diamond users" who just spam copy/paste responses. If your business depends on their services, you're fucked if you slip up in the smallest way. Have fun trying to get ahold of anyone who can help, unless you're lucky and have a friend who works there. Side note, they're going to further penalize apps based on performance/ANRs, yet they haven't fixed the issue of admob's banner ads causing performance issues. It just feels awful. We need more options that can actually help small businesses, not hurt or threaten them.
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- mavamaarten 2y agoYup. Dealing with Google often gives me strong "I'm being held hostage" vibes. Our apps have been rejected from the Play Store for bogus reasons multiple times. Sometimes it's an easy fix (aka just release the same update but with higher version number - to get another bot or human to take a look), sometimes it takes a week, sometimes we've had to pull strings and had to escalate our issue through a contact at Google. But if you're a small fish, they will absolutely let you rot.
- pyr0hu 2y agoCan agree. We are awaiting for a response on our DUNs number. They said we have to provide a DUNS number, which we have, and it has to be exactly 9 characters long. Ours is 10. Apple accepts it, Google does not. Even the DUNS lookup site only finds our company using the 10 characters number. Google gives no response just extended the deadline until they remove our account for not providing the DUNs number. Funny thing is that our number starts with a zero so theoretically it could be 9 characters long but the official lookup requires the 0 prefix
- echelon 2y ago
- daft_pink 2y agoI don’t quite understand why they don’t just let trusted users manually rate search results and feed that through AI to determine ranking penalties similar but not exactly like Kagi.
- tensor 2y agoProbably because they prefer a ranking order that promotes sites with more of their ads or some such, and/or causes users to spend more time going through results looking at more ads.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
- webdoodle 2y agoFor the same reason Twitter, Facebook and other anti-social media companies fired there Trust and Safety teams. The parasitic elite can't trust hoomans to not turn on them and promote sites and ideas that they consider dangerous to there rule. This is the reason A.I. has risen in prominence, and is clearly biased when talking about the class war.
- kevinventullo 2y agoAre there explicit examples of bias in AI when talking about the class war?
- Nasrudith 2y agoFor one because it would be quite abusable. Get a user account to trusted status and then sell it. This is in addition to any scalability issues.
- summerlight 2y agohttps://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en They're already doing that with paid quality raters. I suppose your question is about opening this up more widely, but that's basically giving those spammers a tool to directly influence the ranking, which is going to be even worse.
- Tomte 2y ago> Techopedia started life as a solid tech site. Now, it’s a front for gambling and crypto. When it was penalized, it experienced a massive crash in traffic and rankings. Google actually did something to improve search!
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- julianeon 2y agoBut with that kind of money stream behind it, the mouse can go back to his investors and purchase a tiny mouse jetpack (or whatever the SEO equivalent is) to gain an advantage. If the cat learns to swat that, he'll come back with a toy car. Google is fairly active but eventually they give up: the mouse is a lot more motivated to get his cheese than the cat is to get the mouse. Google can penalize them 10 times in a row, but the 11th time, they win - and they essentially have the bankroll for infinite attempts.
- _aavaa_ 2y agoExcept the mouse only exists in the world because the cat choose to. Google doesn't have to list websites that are bad actors. There's nothing to Optimize if the search engine doesn't list you.
- xnx 2y agoThe images are too small for me to make out the search terms. It seems like they're casino and crypto related? The whole category is a cess pit. I'm not sure there's any such thing as good rankings in that area. My concern for quality of search results from Google in this category is close to zero.
- joecool1029 2y ago> My concern for quality of search results from Google in this category is close to zero. This thinking is the problem. I'm not sure the best answer is to manually penalize some of the regular players. More will fill their place and it only incentivizes churn and burn behavior. In short, what I mean to say is you take out big established institutions you consider shady but people are searching for, those people will still seek out even shadier new players to fit their need. It makes them even less safe.
- Inviz 2y agoMy newish e-commerce website was removed from google.crawling is fine, no penalties. Then google removed website link from my business profile, because it’s not in search results. Any tips what to do next?