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Comment by orenlindsey | Hacker News Reader

I really think it would be cool if Google started being more open about their SEO policies. Projects like this use 100,000 sites to try to discover what Google does, when Google could just come right out and say it, and it would save everyone a lot of time and energy.

The same outcome is gonna happen either way, Google will say what their policy is, or people will spend time and bandwidth figuring out their policy. Either way, Google's policy becomes public.

Google could even come out and publish stuff about how to have good SEO, and end all those scammy SEO help sites. Even better, they could actively try to promote good things like less JS when possible and less ads and junk. It would help their brand image and make things better for end users. Win-win.

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I'm sure there's some bias since it's coming from the horse's mouth, but Google does publish this stuff. Their webmaster guidelines have said for years to make content for users, not robots, and some recent updates have specifically addressed some of the AI SEO spam that's flooding the internet[1]. Their site speed tools and guidelines give very specific recommendations on how to minimize the performance impact of javascript[2].

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat...

[2] https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about

Spam makes transparency impossible. Like you, spammers have to spend months figuring out what works and what doesn’t. If Google is clear, it’s just abused. You can see this every day with free services and they either have to make it harder for everyone or just succumb.

Except that spammers have the incentive to spend months figuring out and normal people don't. So the spammers prevail anyway.

It's from 2019 so things may have changed since, but there's a great video on YouTube explaining "How Google Search indexes JavaScript sites" straight from the horse's mouth: https://youtu.be/LXF8bM4g-J4

Google will never tell you how the ranking algorithm works because if they did, the ranking algorithm would be gamed. Basically, the problem is a lot of people will try to get less relevant content to rank higher than the best content. If you tell these people how Google's ranker works, they will make Google search worse because they will learn how deceive the ranker.

A ranker is a piece of software which determines what results should be show to a user on the search results page.

duh.

The nerve of parent comment telling Google what to do.

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