Google Search is routinely gamed by private blog networks
unlikekinds.com
unlikekinds.com
Domain was new, never saw that website when I researched my competition and it was on top positions on multiple keywords. The tool itself is nothing but a wrapper to `languagetool`, stuff that you can see on hundreds of other websites starting from page 2 in search results.
Digging through the data I was amazed to discover that he's basically running xrummer to comment on all the possible blogs and forums out there, on discussions and topics completely unrelated to the target website so yeah 2000's hacks are still valid. 1 year passed and he's still above me.
How are they unable to detect a comment spam towards a new domain? Blog posts spammed to death with thousands of unrelated comments that even my 8 year old could spot.
it's not only that they don't help, they could ( and afaik used to ) damage reputation/ranking. But maybe this changed in recent years.
My pet theory is that with any filter there is always some stuff that gets through and if you're automatically spamming a few thousand comments then even a tiny percentage is going to make it worth the effort.
There is also a chance they'll get a few comments on sites with dofollow links, of which there are still some around.
There's usually a intial period where sites with zillions of spammy backlinks will rank, then they will crash after a weeks /months and will probably never resurface again.
Also note, this guy could be using PBN's, most people who build PBN block the SEO tools(Ahrefs, Majestic, SEMRush, Moz) spider user agents for looking at their site.
Also, he only has 585 referring domains compared to 748k backlinks, so the majority of his backlinks are sitewide backlinks.
Nofollow links aren't going to pump up your stats, but they are vital to diversifying your backlink profile.
Ahrefs goes into a lot more detail here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/nofollow-links/
Perhaps even worse is the rise of "barely legal" blogs... (though these may be the same thing as PBN I suppose), but, by these, I mean, sure, they're original content, original "reviews," and "legitimate" blogs.
But the articles are pumped out en masse, often written in sub-par English, with nothing more than re-wording of a reviewed site's "about us" page. (Perhaps they're even training Markov models on reviewed sites' content?) But they increasingly dominate searches, particularly in the B2B and B2C tech space.
Do these serve customers' search intent? They're simple gateway pages: the content is often not really "readable." But since Google favors "reviews" and pages that link to many other top 10 SERPs, they dominate, vs legit product pages.
Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists. Just endless lists of "alternatives to X," and "rankings of XYZ products" (with next to no legit reviews), or "here's the stack this company uses." All designed to get widespread long tail links.
These drive me nuts. I wish there was a way to incorporate trusted users flagging sites like this. I'm sure there's technical issues with it, but ideally it would let you "hide results from this site" to both keep them from popping up _and_ serve as a flag against the site.
This could be illegal as much. Especially in the long run.
OpenAI recently demonstrated a frighteningly high quality text generator[1] which leaves me concerned about the future.. humanity of the web - no more of those sub-par English articles if a bot writes for you.
Makes me think we'll inevitably see large tracts of the web near-fully automated - information gathering (research) and text generation (writing) for articles based on a simple prompt for that spark of creativity.
Next ten years sure will be interesting on the web.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/17/openai-text-generator-dang...
Internet is really turning into a low trust society... I guess network sites with only your friends will become more important then. With probably even bigger niche conspiracy and antivaxx bubbles then now..
Why do people care whether a human or a bot wrote a comment / draw a picture / developed software.. ? The only relevant metric is the quality of the comment / picture / software, isn't it?
Tech like deepfakes or generated text is going to require us all to cryptographically sign content in the future. I foresee a time where white house press releases must be signed by the president just to confirm its real content.
For example if the president was filmed saying something in public he later wanted to deny, he could just claim it was faked. The person who filmed it could sign it, but who are they and what authority do they have to claim that they didn't fake it?
The problem is that bot traffic is virtually definitionally not neutral; it is trying to attempt some goal, overt or covert. That might be advertising, link farming, submarine placement, karma whoring (to some later use), vulnerability probing (if only for anti-bot defences), information gathering, or various forms of propaganda: disinfo/misinfo, instigation, or just overwhelming channels with noise (the Chinese model). Even putatively benign and declared bot rapidly become at best annoyances as experiences on Reddit and Mastodon are showing. Good bot practices require very judicious and closely administered use. Wikipedia and IRC service and janitorial bots are examples of positive use. Each is controlled and deployed by specific administrators.
I've seen and reported appearance of covert bot accounts across multiple networks. They never prove benign.
All of these reduce the human-to-human trust of a network -- the presumption that a given interaction is with an actual human, absent grossly obvious ulterior motives.
As a few others have noted, excessively mediated experiences seem to become lower rather than higher trust, a characteristic I've suspected for some time is a generalised case, with some possibly exceedingly deep cultural and sociological implications.
This rapidly veers off into my own hypothesis and theories, but; looking back at histories of communications technology and practice, particularly over the past 200 years or so, the practice of imprved coms is parallelled by routinised and standardised formats, and far less obsequious and religious language. (See especially research by James Beniger and JoAnne Yates on commercial and business communication). As comms latencies fell (from weeks or months to days or minutes, or less), the need to specifically prove and swear allegiance, loyalty, thankfulness, and debt in every exchange falls.
I also suspect (though I've found no discussion) that a major role of empirical religious traditions, which every major preindustrial empre seems to have had, is building a shared social trust basis. This would be a social mechanism of religion.
Other interesting observations are that it was the greek god Hermes represented trade, merchants, commerce, roads ... and thieves and trickery. It was as the first high-spped comms networks (telegraph) and motorised highway system emerged (Mississippi steam-powered river boats) that the idea of the confidence man emerged in Herman Melville's novel of the same name. The elements of distant communications, and speedy entry and exit, create the space required for fraud.
A different tack is taken by Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome, looking at the co-emergence of disease, epidemics, and plague with both urban density and high-volume (for the time) trade, commerce, and travel. Though he doesn't touch on fraud.
The whole question of how and why high- and low-trust cultures develop is an interesting one.
You might be interested in this: https://www.stopforumspam.com/
A problem is latent networks. Obviously linked accounts, no (or little) visible activity.
A couple of cases from Ello:
Although a comment like what I just wrote would require some logical deduction if it hasn't appeared on the internet before.
Like your XKCD comic, want to write an undetectable comment bot? Make artificial information fetching (like Google assistant) and add semantic reasoning and logical deduction.
... We'll invent general AI just to get users to click links to "Top 27 hair brushes for curly hair"
(Also, I guess someone could write a bot to find questions in comments, ask Google for the "according to Wikipedia" answer and copy it in, then slip in a "btw visit my site for top 12 hats you should buy if you like Pokemon go")
In fact, the content has been so good for a long time that even scientific papers get accepted https://gizmodo.com/mathematics-journal-approves-paper-fille... and that was back in 2012.
It’s not like people going to switch to Goggle’s competition.
Excuse my cynicism, it’s just that I can no longer find quality content/service/product in Google, I am over reliant on social media for discovering new things but apparently Google’s businesses is doing great.
I started using Bing more than 6 months ago and haven’t switched back. I don’t think Bing is better, but it isn’t much worse.
Stack Overflow is terrible for it. More often than not the whole first page becomes a bunch of links to the same original SO post, just hosted in different places with different ads on top.
I’m not sure DDG and alternatives are any better, just because of the pure amount of noise that exists on the internet to beat google at their game.
Poor english skills are often a stronger indicator that the content is genuine. Search Twitter for a trending hashtag as an example. The vast majority of people in this world can't string words together real good.
I'm at the point where I now try to explicitly search sites like Reddit or Quora as Google seems to be full of so much trash and bias / affiliate spam before you find what you want.
To be honest, PBN's are nowhere near as effective as they were a couple of years ago. The chance of getting a manual action against your site is a lot higher.
If you were going to drop a few thousand dollars on buying backlinks, you don't want to have your site de-indexed by Google in 6 months without getting an ROI.
Non-English versions of Google are more linens and are still easy to game for PBN's.
Also, all PBN's are not all created equally. Making sure the domain isn't dropped, different whois details/domain registrars/hosting providers. Also putting relevant links to sites other than what clients have paid for to make this look more legitimate.
Niches with big competition like Pharma/Gambling/Game Hacks/Lead Gen will continue to user PBN's, but bigger SEO's will be diversifying their link building portfolio by building more whitehat links like guest posts and then sending more questionable links like PBN's to them as a tier 2 backlink.
And it’s a snow balling effect, they still need to provide results to users, and with more spammy websites in a market the average website can get away with more dodgy tactics.
Kept happening for months. I'd disavow them, 10x as many would show up weeks later. Eventually I lost interest fighting and just stopped disavowing them.
There was never any penalty and from what I could tell the extra links actually helped our rankings! After about 18 months the links stopped. No clue what happened.
Unless your competitor had some serious dosh to mass spam your site on PBN's, they would most likely being using a tool like Xrumer or GSA where you can purchase a 100k backlink blast for as little as $5
Edit: better link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en
I also like to see who’s advertising because it shows which industries/companies compete on marketing, instead of their own merits.
It really shows which products have high marginal profits.
Quite frankly this is wrong. You can have all the merits in the world, but if people don't know about it then you're out of business.
> It really shows which products have high marginal profits.
AdWords can be life or death enough that it's worth eating the cost because the alternative is not having a business.
With the rise of social media, this is about 20 years out of date. If you have a great product and 100 users, 1000 people are going to see glowing testimonials at zero cost.
https://rivoniaplumber24-7.co.za/?wpamp https://midrandplumber24-7.co.za/?wpamp https://plumberdurbannorth.co.za/ https://bluffplumber.co.za/
Think a different bunch but look at the keyword stuffing: http://www.plumbersgauteng.co.za/gauteng-plumbers-areas/plum...
Google aren’t even making ad money on this. It’s just crap content and really bad old-style spam. If they just required a business location it might help.
Are we in the 90’s?!
Reply All podcast made an episode on it: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2ho87/78-very-quick...
There's also companies like RingPartner that are referred to Pay Per Call networks and give you a unique phone number to promote and you get paid per call.
I don't know why they bothered. As this article notes, content is cheap. You can always find someone to write empty words for pennies. I can see no easy way for Google to combat this apart from boosting trusted sites.
One way to try to raise your PageRank is to submit your own articles to HackerNews, like whalabi just did. Nothing wrong with that - I've done it myself - but it didn't work for me.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bounce-rate-signal-23671...
In the original PageRank? No.
These days, who knows? But Google only knows how long people stay on the page using Google Analytics and many sites (mine, for instance) don't use it.
I am a quick reader and are very good at quickly skimming articles. I hope Google doesn't rank pages based on time spent, since Google would be optimizing their search away from my preferences.
They know what time you clicked the link in the search results to go to page X. They also know when you hit the back button to come back to the search results.
My understanding was the faster you backed out meant the less-relevant the page was.
It was one of many factors in the ranking algorithm.
I think they also know if there are any ads hosted by google, or if the user is using chrome.
Depending on how moral they are, they could figure it out if the user is on android at all, or if the site has recaptcha, or if they're using google DNS, or if they have a partnership with the ISP, or if the site is loading fonts or javascript libraries from google servers, and probably some others that I can't think of off the top of my head.
Here's how I understood it to work:
If a user finds you on a Google search and then clicks the link, Google times how long it takes for you to come back to the search results. So if you immediately backed out of the page they would take that as meaning the result was crap and they took that into account in their algorithm. The thinking being that it was an irrelevant result.
However, that counts against sites that provide the answer you want right at the top of the page so that when you open the page, the answer is staring you in the face... so obviously you are going to back out again as you have your answer.
This was from around two years ago when I was researching building an indexer and search engine for kicks so my memory of how it worked is fuzzy.
Also, it may have changed.
That way I don't to wait for the pages to load, as they load while I'm launching the next etc.
Then I go through the tabs, closing the ones that are useless.
Not sure how Google would deal with this.
As long as they don't use lazy loading that is..
When users click the back button they bounce back through the redirect to the SERP.
You can test the tracking by right clicking and copy/pasting the URL of any Google search result. This can be stripped using add-ons (and I highly recommend it).
Probably not even Google at this point. There's enough ML in play now that they couldn't tell you definitively why the top pages are the top pages.
- "Clickstream" data from Chrome. Sorry I don't have the source in hand, but I remember that Rand Fishkin was talking about it some time ago.
- Statistical analysis on the SERP (eg. if you search for something, click a link, go back and pick another result, that is a bounce)
- This is just speculation, but I'd say their ad network can be a source too
People these days are constantly under attack for what I call "wrong think crimes" is where they disagree on a particular issue (almost doesn't matter what it is) and then they are attacked constantly by groups of individuals who think they are morally superior as they are "thinking correctly".
Any "Trusted" site will be treated the same way. Google will be pressured by a group to remove the trusted status, due to whatever politics are in vogue at the time.
Google has done a lot since 2011 to identify pbns and take them down. This article seems a bit outdated.
It's well known that some of the sellers on there are artificially inflating their views and replies, and a few of the top sellers are probably using hacked logins to write reviews (their database was leaked a few years ago: https://hacked-emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhat...)
For example, take a look at this thread: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/captain-jack-sparrow-2019-...
Thousands of replies that all sound very similar "Order confirmed Transaction ID: XXX"
The first post on the first page of that thread is an interesting read, what a way to market your services.
Well they obviously are if they're called something else more frequently. But I've heard them called both, interchangeably with equal frequency. I think this is a bit nitpicky
> they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are dropped.
Ummm... even before they expire? :)
The thing is, this mostly stopped being relevant about 2ish years later circa 2013-2014. Google massively improved its ability to identify and penalize or discount these things.
You can still make effective PBNs to this day, but the cost to get them to pass the google sniff test is basically on par with just doing legitimate marketing, but carries additional risk.
Given that, most of the serious search marketers I know have long since abandoned these crappy tactics in favor of serving searcher intent and earning relevant links through smart content promotion and outreach. Folks who still buy and sell this stuff are mostly people who haven't updated their skills in a very long time, or those that prey on the same.
Some common example tactics include:
Broken Backlink Building: Create high quality page, then look for pages that have historically served the same searcher intent and attracted backlinks but are now no longer available and reach out to sites that linked to that and offer them the newer resource to fix their broken link.
Skyscraper technique: Make a list of similar pages that serve same search intent as a term or topic you are going after, sorted by relevance and links earned. Make a significantly better page, then reach out to webmasters linking to the other resource and suggest your better/more-up-to-date/relevant to readers link as an alternative.
Social Proof Pitch: Before promoting your content to Journo's and Bloggers, try to get it to the top of a subreddit or the reddit homepage or otherwise demonstrate its popularity on other social networks. Then when you pitch it you can point to it likely being a useful resource. Also works if the thing you got to do well socially is a stub of a story and you offer to write in-depth about it or about an important part of a larger story as a guest post.
Citable elements:
Make otherwise hard-to-link-to pages like landing pages easier to link to by adding relevant citable elements (charts, graphs, facts & figures) that bloggers and journo's may wish to reference.
Unlinked Brand Mentions:
Set up alerts for any time your brand is mentioned. If you see one that isn't a link but a link would be relevant in the context of the article, ask the author to make the mention a link.
HARO / SourceBottle / Reporter Connection:
Make yourself available as a subject matter expert to reporters, and when giving expert quotes, reference deeper explanations in articles already present on your site.
Reverse Guest Post: Pay or entice industry authority/influencer to write something on your site to attract additional eyeballs to your other content.
Topical Interviews / Industry Round-ups / Guest Speaking ( podcasts, video, conferences): Go places where relevant audiences already exist and get them interested in hearing more from you.
Get Friendly with Pirates: Use copyscape or reverse image search to find people who are using your content or images without proper attribution. Instead of sending take-down requests, ask that they credit, with a link the source and or do a cross domain rel canonical to the original content.
And so on, and so forth. Good Search marketers have a wide variety of tactics at their disposal. Great search marketers will only apply the relevant ones rather than trying to offer clients one-size-fits all strategies.
Edit: A lot of these are much easier with the help of some tools like ahrefs, semrush, pitchbox/buzzstream, hunter.io and the like.
I see a lot of stuff you quote is from Brian dean (afaik?), but is there any other site, or author from where you are learning this?
I've been in the space since 2009 and most of what I know I learned via trial and error, just setting up test sites to see what works (see my linked video from 2011 for more on that). That said there is a really nice community in the SEO space with people eager to share whats worked for them or put their own spin on widely adopted tactics and strategies.
Off the top of my head I'd recommend Ahrefs (both their blog as well as their YouTube channel), Backlinko (that'd be Brian Dean), SEO by the Sea (mostly digging into google patents and trying to understand their implications for search), Moz, anything by Nick Eubanks, Cyrus Shepard, ViperChill, Ross Hudgens, Garret French or Jon Cooper.
One thing to keep in mind is a lot of stuff goes out of fashion pretty quickly. If you are reading a post about SEO from a few years ago, double check to make sure its still in line with best practices and effective. If it seems like a short-term tactic it's probably best avoided regardless. And above all else, don't assume because some SEO Guru said a thing is a thing that it is indeed a thing. Test everything. Google doesn't give a manual for how to rank and they make changes to the algorithm regularly, so everyone is making educated guesses. There are many schools of thought inside the SEO industry. When in doubt, test it out.
Have you ever paid for buying links? I know it is against Google's policy but SEO companies I talked to before I decided to learn it myself told me that 18 out of 100 links are paid links (with maybe 2 free links as every SEO guy is doing broken lb, etc so free links are mostly taken). They said they can even get me links from some pretty big sites if I had the budget for it.
Is that true? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Sadly, it seems most people cannot distinguish between content provided by people with a genuine interest and knowledge between "content" of no substance or authority.
In gardening this is especially true because one could simply copy the text on the back of a seed packet and add filler words to make a paragraph. For a lot of these types of topics and blogs google should really look at re-engagement scores.
How many many times the user comes back to the same page, how many times it’s bookmarked and how often the user views other content on the page.
That being said I think google is probably complicit in reducing search quality because doing so Allows them to present many times the number of ads. If it takes 20-30 websites and multiple searches to find a decent article on growing strawberries then they would have generated that much extra ad revenue. There isn’t an incentive to get search right, just right enough that they are better than bing and that’s not a hard metric to beat.
But DDG in my native language? OMG. 99% results is machine generated, machine translated fake sites. It feels like walking in endless landfill.
He peddled this pills and had built an impressive (by 2009 standards) network of 87 WP installs with generated crap in them that linked heavily with each other, all on this OVH instance and had managed to break one of the plugins he used for this purpose, so he posted a bid on GetAFreelancer, which I won and never saw a cent for.
I'm still really pissed about that for some reason.
It's actually weird that these rank so high. The very least Google used to do well was to filter this garbage. I can understand them losing the SEO battle, but that they fail to filter straight-up spam is quite interesting.
Search quality has been on the decline for a while now, but in the past 3-6 months it's gotten really really bad for anything that isn't mainstream and popular.
I have more "showing results for XYZ, do you want to see results for your actual query QRS?" than just showing QRS.
Yeah, I do, that's why I typed it.
> 10 results for QRS. Still irrelevant and excluding words, even in quotes
The search team must have lost a lot of talent recently, it's amateur hour.
A few months later, I googled my name and all that came up were fluffy blog entries he wrote on various generic blogs. They were all slightly different. He pushed me off the front page.
Granted, I don't really care about being found online. (Just leads to too much spam, recruiters are the worst.) But, a few days later I happened to be on Google's campus and someone who tracked those things struck up a conversation with me. I politely pointed out the gimmick that the other person did.
Normally, I don't like pulling strings, but I certainly had the last laugh at that one!
Unless it was a general algorithmic change that took care of that, manually intervening in the Serps for personal favors would be completely against Google's stated rules. If possible (I have some doubts), it's probably a nice side gig for employees, since rankings are easily worth millions.
The cloned posts ranked higher than my blog posts
If we had many important engines with many algorithms, it might dilute any particular tactic that SEO uses.
Imho, the main problem is that there's no deterrent. Even if you get caught doing some very black hat stuff, worst thing that can happen is to get a manual penalty. Remove the outlawed stuff, wait a month or two, submit a reinclusion request and you're back in business. If it was a "once you're caught, you're out for good" thing, SEOs would tread much more carefully.
DDG and Bing often have wildly differing results for me.
In any case, we probably do agree that it would be very good in general if there was more competition in the search market.
Now Google themselves gives dodgy or inconsistent results that incentivize one to look elsewhere, but I don't think it is entirely their fault-- charlatans can crank out chum content faster than it can be analyzed and indexed. Google is doing the best the can...they have their own financial interests but they happen to align with ensuring people trust their results.
The scale and nature of the web these days is very different than it was in '96. There was a competing engine popping up every year-- an endless cycle of "___ sucks, use ___ instead."
But I haven't heard of anything other than Google and DDG since Cuil failed.
The number one tip most SEO blogs cite these days is to use AMP. It can skyrocket a crummy site over a non AMP site with much better content for many trending keywords.
I find that this type of thing is equivalent to gaming the search results as it would be by doing low quality blogs. Just this time the hack is offered by the G itself.
I wonder if things would be better if Google went back to the old approach of Yahoo which involved hiring humans to manually rank the pages (at least partially). I think search results would be significantly better.
If google knows who the robots are, and who the humans are, there’s a lot more human input to outweigh a human SEO team managing a team of bots.
And google can probably determine which users are best at determining page value and weight their input highly.
For example search results could include ‘prioritize results from this site’, and ‘never show results from this site’ as options on each result.
As far as I can see the only reason this kind of search customization is not offered is because it would undermine Google’s business model.
The tricksters arbitrage both sides of this exchange. -- the producers and consumers.
And yes, sometimes the deception may be in appearing to be something not valuable but instead high-risk: bluff threats, imitation of poisonous or stinging animals or insects, inflatable tanks.
"All warfare is based on deception."
there's -> there are
Thanks for the heads-up