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Comment by rcarrigan87 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this is there is a whole industry around what is called 'negative SEO' which has basically defeated the purpose of these reporting tools.

It goes like this. You want to hurt a competitor so you hire an SEO agency to do a bunch of black hat stuff to the competitor's site. Then you report the competitor's site to google in hopes that they penalize them. Now google is put in an awkward position where the site that looks guilty is actually innocent.

For Google, the best place to focus is moving away from penalties for the most part and just trying to devalue spammy tactics. It'll never be perfect, but at least this way you avoid companies attacking each other.

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All in all this is just the web moving more in the direction of 'you get what you pay for'. In the olden days you had to almost always pay for advertising to get business (if not word of mouth). Take Yellow Pages as an example if someone had the money to pay for a bigger ad [1] generally they got more calls from yp users. The rest battled it out by trying to name their businesses 'aaaaaplumbing' 'a+plumbing' and so on to get near the top of the listings. Or to get a 'big' sounding phone number xxx-xxx-2000 etc. Google profits when people get frustrated with SEO because they get to sell more ads or at least have the price of those ads bid up. This makes perfect sense hard to believe they couldn't use (hat to say it) AI or better algorithms to figure out what is going on if they wanted to.

[1] Sometimes though you placed a big and a small ad since some people want to deal with a small company and not a big company so you needed both.

Do you know how they detect those? It looks that even pages with 100 links pointing to only one other site, with spammy domains and keyword stuffed texts still help with Google.

If the algorithms don't catch them, they'll eventually attract the attention of a human Google reviewer, at which point they'll be assessed a manual penalty that will show up in the Search Console: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en

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