Google Search SEO document leak reveals how company curates internet | Hacker News Reader

Google Search SEO document leak reveals how company curates internet

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56 pointsanigbrowl27 comments

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> Some of these factors include Google’s determination of a website’s authority on a given subject

I don't see how this can possibly be a heavily-weighted factor, given how so many of the top results for many searches are obvious content-farm garbage.

It's funny. Wikipedia is consistently the top results for me, with only narrow exceptions like health and disease topics. Does Google really consider Wikipedia to be authority here? Maybe the topic itself doesn't have any natural authority.

Some content farms are considered more authoritative than others (seriously, can't make this shit up)

It might also be a sparse signal. Like when it has a good authoritative result, it counts positively, but it rarely has a good authoritative match?

Yes this seems likely because important things like government websites and banks seem to always come up.

I have worked in SEO for 10+ years and didn't find this very useful. Yes, it validates a bunch of theories I have. No, it doesn't change how I will do anything.

Yeah people are acting like everyone needs to scramble to take advantage of this, but it's mainly not actionable to improve your own rankings.

If you're a black hat then I guess making your clickfarms spend more time on your site might be useful now, but if you are playing by the book then continuing to make good content that people want to read remains the most important factor.

This is not actionable, but certainly demoralizing for those of us working for years in SEO.

That’s the same with a lot of hype in SEO circles. It’s the usual loud voices making a big deal out of it, but when you get down to the actual practicalities, not much changes.

Not least because very little of it is conclusive in terms of what Google do and don’t use, weightings, etc

It’s most valuable because it shows up a lot of googles public statements where they’ve said they don’t even consider certain things, with this implying they very definitely do in some capacity

Why does Google not have a form where anyone can submit a complaint that a top search result is a garbage site?

If the top search result is full of falsehoods, it should be easy to report and get it moved off the top few pages.

[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40496967

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You literally have to force people NOT to use Google Search. That’s how much people like Google. For that reason, the vast majority of population on earth have voted and they have made Google the custodian of the internet. I don’t understand the criticism that Google has ruined the internet. It’s a company with shareholders who demand y/o/ growth. Their job is to be make money by providing a useful service in the process. A service which is extremely expensive to run. If people don’t want Google to have this much power of the internet, then you need to campaign for consumers to stop using it. The odds of that succeeding is zero. That means the ball is in Google’s court and they can do whatever they please.

This is circular reasoning. You can't convince people to not use it if you don't criticize it, and of course the odds of that succeeding are zero if you don't even try.

Also, you literally have to force people to not use google search because it's the near universal default. The majority of the population with internet access does not care about it being google in particular as long as the engine works.

Many things have been universal defaults, then a truly better product appeared or an inferior one was inflicted to people and they could not dodge it. The default changed.

The first Google was an example of a truly better product compared to Yahoo, Altavista, etc. For browsers, the first Firefox vs IE6. Both with only word of mouth. Or the first Chrome vs Firefox, at least for JS speed. Both word of mouth and advertising.

Examples of inferior products that people could not dodge: many Microsoft corporate products. The latest one is probably Teams. Maybe Windows 11 too. Of course Windows 8.

If every smartphone and desktop OS right now summoned a pop up screen telling everyone on earth what they want their search engine to be, the loss in market share would be a rounding error for Google. If that’s not fair and square win for a company, I don’t know what is.

The only way for Google to lose market share is if Apple changed the default search engine in iOS and redirected people to Bing with an UI that has the same UI as Google search. At that point, people who aren’t tech savvy will think it’s just Google and business is usual for them.

You’re definitely right about that. I don’t think it’s about defaults in this case like it was for Microsoft.

This time Google should get clapped for their ad auction shenanigans.

>If people don’t want Google to have this much power of the internet, then you need to campaign for consumers to stop using it.

We need some politicians with a backbone to clamp down on their bad behavior. Nobody is going to cry over Google being put under heavier regulations. They're a spyware vendor as far as I am concerned.

In the 2000's, any self-respecting nerd would have been repulsed by them (we used to fight when websites stored cookies or logged our IPs, remember that? :) ). But they slow-cooked the frog.

This has been making waves in the SEO world. I was always more surprised that people honestly believed Google wasn't manipulating results. In the political realm it was treated as tinfoil hat territory.

How do you rank pages without “manipulating” the ranking?

Well, yes, but there was a presumption of fairness (insert definition here) in pure ranking of content based on quality, backlinks, etc. that sort of thing. Personally I never believed it but it was a pervading belief.

> pure ranking of content based on quality, backlinks, etc. that sort of thing.

Wasn't that system being heavily exploited by link farms and the rest?

Always

What does fairness mean in this context though? Fairness to whom and by what measure of the term?

That is the question, which is why I said insert definition here.

Maybe I am part of a different SEO world but everyone I know assumed this to be the case.

Yeah just depends on who you’re talking to. There are various cliques out there.

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