Google begins enforcement of site reputation abuse policy | Hacker News Reader

Google begins enforcement of site reputation abuse policy

searchengineland.com

94 pointstaubek33 comments

Selling links is a multi billion dollar industry that no one ever has dared to put a finger on. If you want, you can get editorial links from sites like The New York Times, Forbes, etc. so as long as you have a few thousand dollars to spare.

For an average scenario, let's say - an article about "AI tools for text-to-speech", if that article ranks well in Google - you can easily sell top spots in it for $999 and no one will be any wiser. This isn't something that Google can ever control, but it is a thing. And because it is a thing, it has also highly contributed to the well-known SEO problem.

Google has said it takes links less seriously these days, but the prices for buying sponsored posts / guest posts haven't really fluctuated much in the last 10 years.

Publishers like Forbes, who at one time was considered the 'de facto' source for all things business, are able to capitalize from their strong "domain authority" to pump out articles in any given category: business, tech, drama, pop news, web dev, etc. So as long as there is a potential for a small affiliate income - Forbes will make itself an expert on the matter.

This pushes out small publishers who might be experts on the topic, or at the very least have direct day-to-day interaction with the topic, who will never be able to compete with Forbes (or any other such site) because inherently the Google system is broken. The small publisher simply doesn't stand a chance, and what Google is doing now is a band-aid fix that will avoid penalizing the entire domain and focus on 'specific sections', yet it's the site itself that is responsible for these actions.

Forbes got so scared of this update they 410'd their entire coupons directory[0][1], so what will Google do about this? Give them a pass? It's blatant manipulation.

[0]: https://www.seroundtable.com/forbes-completely-removes-coupo...

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/coupons

Forbes.com is basically a blogging platform with a small number of journalists and an army of random contributors, quite a few of whom are scam artists. All those random blogs are not terribly different from medium.com in essence, but Forbes.com presents them with a veneer of authority, when they’re really just unvetted, unedited garbage for the most part. I’m surprised the domain isn’t in the gutter yet.

Costs 2.5-5k/year for the privilege of blogging on their platform: https://bestorganizations.com/marketing/forbes-communication...

It's like being a speaker at lots of conferences, the slot comes with a sponsorship package, people think they're watching an invited talk but it's a paid ad.

Off-topic: It’s really sad to see all the low effort, ChatGPT written, informationless posts on Medium these days.

If this becomes the norm then you might as well cut out the middleman and just go straight to ChatGPT and ask it to generate an article on the subject you’re interested in.

Oh. Thinking about this right now, that’s an interesting concept - soon you’ll be able to generate your own content for personal consumption. Forget going online to learn about a topic or read about recent events, just have a conversation with ChatGPT. Mind blown

Thought this was a interesting read about Google's search result changes recently:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

> Unfortunately, Google’s documentation only deems “site abuse reputation” as spam when the site uses third parties to produce and/or publish pages to manipulate search rankings.

The article argues that it will just shift the pattern of spam companies so that they can generate their own spam in-house.

great article. retro dodo was also hit https://retrododo.com/google-is-killing-retro-dodo/

This is what was most important for me

"That’s why I’ve gone back to how I used to use search engines in the early days of the web: mix and match. If I don’t find something on DuckDuckGo, I check Kagi, Bing, Google, and Brave. This is something I’m teaching my children, too."

I also search my own domain repository to find anything https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

When I search for "mint alternative", the first links are from reddit, which is pretty easy to spam.

The second looks like a parasite article. It is paid content from some Taboola company. It's difficult to tell who is making the money. Did some affiliate publisher pay for Taboola Turnkey to run their article on Time.com to take advantage of their domain authority? Or is Time.com itself making money off the affiliate links?

The ranking of their top product recommendation has switched between Empower (which pays at least $100 per lead), and Quicken. Currently Empower must be paying the most as it is listed as best, but a few weeks ago it was Quicken.

I'll be watching this keyword to see if the results page improves. Been really frustrated with Google results lately.

I heard all this hubbub about Mint going away, but I think it just rebranded. Now it’s part of the Credit Karma app and it still works, my accounts are all still there.

It reminds of the HBO/Max thing. Seems like a braindead decision to try to force all of your customers to install a new app to keep existing functionality. It’s like acquiring all your customers all over again. You’re bound to lose a bunch. Even if it’s downstream of some corporate reorganization, why not keep both apps around in the App Store and just update the branding? If there’s a technical migration happening, even if it’s a totally new code base, can you not ship that as an update and just exist in the App Store under multiple names?

I dunno. I switched over to https://lunchmoney.app/. But it was so frustrating wading through all the bad search results to find it.

Credit Karma seems to only have a tiny fraction of the functionality that Mint had.

JustEat (European food delivery app) did this right. They acquired a bunch of companies, pyszne.pl, takeout.com, whatever the German one was called, and just replaced all their apps with the one they already had. The branding stayed the same, the Polish app for example is still called pyszne.pl and the JustEat branding is completely absent here, but all of these apps have the same UI and use the same backend. You can see this very clearly if you go to another country and open your local app, it's just going to work.

Strange that Google still relies so heavily on site authority.

Shouldn't they have a good grasp on where people actually go on the web, which pages they use, share, bookmark etc?

I'm surprised they don't base their rankings on that.

Where’s the money in that?

Google effectively owns internet search. They see search as a sinking ship since AI is poised to replace search.

So now they’re just milking search for all they can before it goes bust.

Why show relevant links when 1000s of companies will pay you to show theirs and like 2/3rds (likely more) of your users won’t know the difference

That would also boost click baits.

This is Google saying “if anyone is going to monetize your site’s reputation it’s us.”

Browsers need to start using default search engine other than Google to try to get people away from Google. And remove Google search from list of searches in settings. I know it’s futile, especially because most people use chrome. But we’ve got to do something to spread the word that Google is not the only search engine out there.

This is like 10 years too late. Almost all major news outlet have been doing that (and variation of that) in the last decade, I wonder what took so long internally

Market power and vested interest, Forbes has a good name and ranks high, more people visit them, Google makes a lot of money off Forbes' display ads even if their content is garbage

News outlets have political power so Google doesn't want to end on their wrong side.

I really wish when I searched say product x vs product y, the top result wasn’t almost always a blog post or article hosted on either one of those companies websites or another company that sells the same product and always recommends their own product as the first or second result.

I’m wondering if enforcement of this policy is entirely manual, and thus focused on the worst violators, but otherwise leaves out other websites which are being abused through hacking (spam articles posted on otherwise legitimate blogs) or through accepting third-party offers for paid articles.

I’m also a little troubled by the description of parasite SEO given in the linked article[1]; in that sense it seems any website which branches out to a new niche would stand to be penalized.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-released-massive-search-...

The article does say that it’s manual but an algorithm enforcement will come later.

I bet the human actions are training a ML system as we speak.

Quite possible. I don’t hold much hope but I wouldn’t mind results getting a bit better. They’re currently a bit of a shitshow.

Google results are just terrible and entirely corrupt from all sides. Everything from the bottom up is pay to play. From affiliate SEO spammers to Google back room deals with big players.

I’ve been a happy Kagi user for a year now. Never going back.

I’m sure Kagi knew what it was doing when diversifying into the T-shirt business.

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

Still there in Germany https://www.google.de/search?q=elektrorasierer+test

Google recaptcha has been failing to catch the spam signups for the past few months.

I hope this deters them

Google is trying to clean up in fear of AI based competition?

I was sure that subdomains do not share a reputation score.

Cookie banner didn't read

Oh, so all this time, what has been ruining Google Search was just LA Times and a few others showing up for "subway coupons"?

A little manual action, and Google Search is all good now.

Wow, why didn't they do this simple house cleaning 15 years ago?

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