Interesting because it shows that bounce-back is a more significant ranking factor than before.
It seems like they've manipulated rankings by locking people in to reduce their bounce-back stats (in addition to keyword-stuffed content)
It seems like they've manipulated rankings by locking people in to reduce their bounce-back stats (in addition to keyword-stuffed content)
...but, you know. Can you see anything else they're doing that would give them that kind of ranking? These pages are just piles of crap, and google is pretty good at filtering that sort of stuff out.
If it was that easy, google would be filled with spam everywhere.
The chance that someone did something random thats very uncommon (block back) and it happened to be a super effective signal to google seems:
a) like an edge case they didn't think of
b) like it'll get fixed pretty fast
c) not that unlikely.
Compared to, say, the idea that some random spammers have built a network of incredibly sophisticated ML-generated pages that can subvert googles algorithms which seems:
a) not substantiated by any obvious content on the pages
b) requires a very high level of sophistication which seems totally lacking
c) very unlikely
...but I mean, who knows right?
We're all just speculating. I guess it'll get fixed soon, and we'll never know.
I am maintaining an SPA and the only thing I do is trying to not pollute history. But I'd never try to block the back button.
If they circle back around to Yandex in N time and go hunting for the same query or similar query, then you can rank the prior attempts as not having been ideally helpful (downrank the result/s they clicked through to when they last searched for that query two minutes ago).
If you do a search for the same terms in DDG vs Bing, you'll find that the results are very similar. DDG lets Microsoft do the dirty work of abusively tracking users to max out on ranking factors, and then DDG reaps the benefit. DDG doesn't need to get its hands dirty, because someone else is doing so much of that for them.
By leaning so heavily on Bing, DDG is a blood diamond merchant of privacy. They might not own the mines or directly command the labor, however they're quite happy to buy the blood diamonds to further their own profit afterward. And DDG's users go along with the scheme, because buying into the con helps them sleep better at night. It works like this mentally: those users over there (at Bing) are having their human right to privacy violated, I know it's going on, and I directly benefit from the search data training as I use DDG, but hey at least it's not me being abused, so I can do my virtue signal dance and sleep well at night comfortable in my compartmentalization.
Especially not for terms that would have a personal vector, like an ambigouous 'Ruby Gems' or controversial 'effectivity of mouth mask'
Actually Metrika is quiet big even outside of ex-CIS countries, IIRC it's like 15% of GA in terms of number of sites.