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Wouldn't it be reasonable from Google to show how their ranking algorithms work so all webmasters and content creators know how to behave on the web. Now we have black box that's causing confusion and is misdirecting websites and web users.

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I don't think so. If the problem is people gaming the system, making it easier to game isn't going to improve the situation. It's not going to put good content creators on a level playing field with spammers, because good content creators simply don't care as much as spammers about search engine gaming.

But people are already gaming the system, and on any search from product reviews to code snippets, I see SEO-optimized spams populating the top results. Good content creator don't have the time or the technical inclination to reverse-engineer the ranking algorithm (or to brute-force by creating tens of thousands of sites and see what sticks in a giant multivariate test).

Knowing the actual rules might give them a fighting chance, since the bad guys already know these rules anyway.

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