Google cracks down on “Parasite SEO,” punishing established publishers

numerobis

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Forbes is horrific at this kind of seo abuse and others. I've seen Google news pick up some variation of "news" posts that go like:
Big company (msft/samsung/apple) update decision. Millions of customers must xyz.

And:

Famous person (gates, Musk, fink) says blah, will trigger collapse / skyrocket of bitcoin/currency/stock.

It's clearly nonsense spam. I hope that gets tackled next.
Blocking Forbes entirely would be useful. Too many people believe it’s a news organization.
 
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numerobis

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The reasonable thing would be for Wirecutter branded search results to be ok and NYTimes branded results to be dropped, but I'm guessing they aren't going to say how its implemented.
Has NYT started carrying unlabeled sponsored content?

I stopped reading them a while ago, is why I ask.
 
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85mm

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Hope they get rid of 'AI overview' and 'questions' next. Scrolling past SEO spam is bad enough, scrolling past a full page of AI word salad and then the SEO spam is a bridge too far.
I'd been meaning to move off Google for search for a while now, but the AI spam was what finally got me to jump.
 
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ProffesorPants

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I wonder if it’s even possible to make a search engine as good as early-2000s Google anymore. The problem is analogous to Goodhart’s law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

As soon as the SEO world figures out how a new search algorithm works, the inevitable decline begins again, and the challenge to create a useful algorithm becomes that much harder.
Honestly? I think the only thing that would work is human curation. The problem is it would take lots of people, lots of work to curate a meaningful amount of stuff. I don't know how it would work either, because a static list wouldn't work as information changes fast, and variable queries might not always fit the content. But some Wikipedia like project where community comes to collaborate and work on rankings.

In fact, Wikipedia did try something like this with Wikia Search, but not enough people were using it to justify the project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia_Search
 
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Oldmanalex

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all true, but google doesn't suck because of SEO. Google sucks because they don't care about good search anymore. They optimize to sell ads and push their products.
Agreed. This is more about putting the boot into some annoying, and worse still, freeloading, competitors than it is about the deenshittification of Google search. After all Google have more than enough fresh and steaming crap to fill their own nest.
 
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Chuckstar

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True. I was watching a special on early food brands and franchising. It was funny how I don't know Duncan Hines as anything other than a brand as opposed to a food critic/guide.
His book was very similar to Zagat, in having just short blurbs about each restaurant. And started the same way -- in both cases, the reviews were originally compiled by a husband/wife team just to give to friends. The difference is that Zagat was originally about fine dining in NYC and Duncan Hines was compiling recommendations from decades as a traveling salesman around the whole country.
 
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Oldmanalex

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The surprising thing to me is that Forbes (which used to be a reasonably written business magazine, although leaning to far right politics), would sully its name and reputation with this sort of crap.

Makes me wonder if Forbes management cares about their reputation any more.
When I was young, and of a radical age, there were many Conservatives to admire, while probably disagreeing with. Now I am old, and of a conservative age, there is nothing left in the movement which even arises to the level of ratbag. So Forbes having taken the same nose dive is hardly surprising.
 
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graylshaped

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True. I was watching a special on early food brands and franchising. It was funny how I don't know Duncan Hines as anything other than a brand as opposed to a food critic/guide.
Food brands are rife with examples; I was thinking more about the tendency of people like Constantine to execute people and have their existence erased from all records because they represented parts of his history inconvenient to his ambitions.
 
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adespoton

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So does that mean that Financial Times, WIRED, and The Discussion articles republished verbatim on Ars will no longer be boosted by Ars' search rankings? Or because they're in the same field and the articles are in the correct context, can we expect to see the Ars version boost results for the original articles still?

[edit] D'oh...

The SEO reordering does not affect more established kinds of third-party content, like wire service reports, syndication, or well-marked sponsored content....

Somehow, I read that but didn't read that.
 
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9 (10 / -1)

sarusa

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Blocking Forbes entirely would be useful. Too many people believe it’s a news organization.
If you're using a good search engine like Kagi you can easily block specific sites as I have done with forbes. It's worse than useless! Though Kagi also surfaces it a lot less than Google does in the first place. ( Whoops, looking up I see other people have mentioned Kagi, but this is specific to your request. )

Google used to let you do this too (block known bad sites), but then they decided serving up shitty results and not letting you block them was the way to go because it meant more ad clicks. I really have to wonder why they're even bothering with this fix, actually, since when have they cared about good search results again? Since Prabahkar got moved to his new executive position? Since their search has become an open running joke and oops that might be a problem for stockholder value?
 
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maxoakland

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I wonder if it’s even possible to make a search engine as good as early-2000s Google anymore. The problem is analogous to Goodhart’s law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

As soon as the SEO world figures out how a new search algorithm works, the inevitable decline begins again, and the challenge to create a useful algorithm becomes that much harder.
It doesn’t seem like Google is even trying. There are so many ways they could handle it, even just by downranking domains that abuse the system

They used to do that, which is why they were so good at that time
 
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cse84

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SEO has broken the internet. Google sucks now. This won't fix things, but at least it's good Google is kinda acknowledging the problem.
SEO is not the cause, only a symptom of the underlying problem. Google, the company, is also a symptom. The underlying problem is that by now the entire Internet with very few exceptions (e.g. Wikipedia) revolves around the business model of being advertising-financed. Google can not solve this problem, because the entire company relies on ad revenue. If they tried to seriously fight the problem, they would only kill themselves. The only way to fight this is to offer subscriptions (like Ars does), be donation-financed (like Wikipedia), collect payment directly from the viewer per visit (only theoretical - I know of no site that has managed to make this business model work), or remain a tiny hobby project.

And that advertising-based companies are extremely inefficient (because optimizing their costs isn't their goal - maximizing ad revenue is) can be seen by comparing the running costs of e.g. Youtube and Wikipedia. Both sites are among the top 10 sites in the world, but Youtube's revenue is over 100x the entire budget of the Wikimedia foundation. You might think efficiency of running a website has little to do with quality, but I just wanted to give 2 examples of what advertising companies are not doing: optimizing user experience and reducing cost per visit.
 
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32 (34 / -2)

numerobis

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If you're using a good search engine like Kagi you can easily block specific sites as I have done with forbes. It's worse than useless! Though Kagi also surfaces it a lot less than Google does in the first place. ( Whoops, looking up I see other people have mentioned Kagi, but this is specific to your request. )

Google used to let you do this too (block known bad sites), but then they decided serving up shitty results and not letting you block them was the way to go because it meant more ad clicks. I really have to wonder why they're even bothering with this fix, actually, since when have they cared about good search results again? Since Prabahkar got moved to his new executive position? Since their search has become an open running joke and oops that might be a problem for stockholder value?
I don’t need it for myself, I need it for others to stop telling me that “Forbes says X” when it’s actually some dipshit with a Forbes site saying it.
 
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Forbes is horrific at this kind of seo abuse and others. I've seen Google news pick up some variation of "news" posts that go like:
Big company (msft/samsung/apple) update decision. Millions of customers must xyz.

And:

Famous person (gates, Musk, fink) says blah, will trigger collapse / skyrocket of bitcoin/currency/stock.

It's clearly nonsense spam. I hope that gets tackled next.
Yeah, I had to tell Google News that I'm not interested in Jamie Diamond because any time he said anything an article would show up in my news feed about it.
 
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just another rmohns

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I wonder if it’s even possible to make a search engine as good as early-2000s Google anymore. The problem is analogous to Goodhart’s law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

As soon as the SEO world figures out how a new search algorithm works, the inevitable decline begins again, and the challenge to create a useful algorithm becomes that much harder.

I think it is possible.

During the early 2010's I had to keep up with the basics of SEO as part of my work, and by the late 2010's I had to pay a lot of attention to it, and have largely kept up.

What reliably worked up until roughly a decade ago was "write good content, that addresses a need, and gives something of value to the visitor". True, SEO specialists were constantly trying to game it, but for the most part, Google's Search Quality team managed to keep up with them and maintain quality. There was always some junk on the search results pages, but mostly not.

But sometime around 2015 or so, Google started falling behind the SEO. It was a gradual process, but by 2020 Google SERPs for anything related to consumer goods or buying were pretty much useless. Most of the sites that hit Page 1 were sales affiliates which ran Google DoubleClick ad inventory.

I've long speculated the problem is that if the search results lead to sites that run Google ad inventory, then that incents Google to keep them on the SERPs. Short term, anyway.

I don't know that it's related, but McKinsey alum Sundar Pichai became CEO in 2015. That seems like around the time that the Ads tail began wagging the Search Quality dog.

To come back to your "is it even possible?" point: If the incentives for the search engine business are correct, yes, I think it is. Google's problem is that it no longer thinks of itself as a search company, but as an ad company. That dramatically changes the goals of the business.

Kagi's doing well for itself, by keeping its interests 100% aligned with its users: If users don't love it, Kagi doesn't make money at all. Ahref's Yep is ambitious, but is pretty new so jury is still out. I used to point to DuckDuckGo as an example of good search, but Bing has begun to lose the SEO plot, which is degrading DDG results.
 
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You can. But Google is under no obligation to take your brand into account when ranking. After all, it’s their search result.

Ideally, search index should be win-win-win. The consumer wins because they find something relevant, the site wins as their relevant content is found and Google wins because the house always wins. That balance was gone with SEO, and this change removes a small part of SEO spam. So, nice.
Yes... and no. It's one of those "it depends" problems. When you're a certified monopolist and your primary market is also advertising, "well it's their website, they can do what they want" no longer is an excuse even under lax US trust enforcement.
 
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1 (3 / -2)

nancy-drew

Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
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Forbes is horrific at this kind of seo abuse and others. I've seen Google news pick up some variation of "news" posts that go like:
Big company (msft/samsung/apple) update decision. Millions of customers must xyz.

And:

Famous person (gates, Musk, fink) says blah, will trigger collapse / skyrocket of bitcoin/currency/stock.

It's clearly nonsense spam. I hope that gets tackled next.
Google News is still promoting Twitter content despite that site just being a Nazi support group, and still promoting sites associated with fake stories, even when those same stories are debunked in their fact-check section.

I ditched them. If anyone has recommendations on something better I'd love it.
 
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SubWoofer2

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This is a positive step that’s taken way too long to implement but the bigger problem is the spammy, no-name, AI-generated content farms that do the same thing as Forbes but lack the reputation abuse aspect

They fill up the first page of search results and don’t provide any real value
This is deliberate by google. You get 10% of your first page of search results as actual search results, the rest is SEO, AI, and other shit derived from acronymed software. Your 10% is right at the bottom of page 1. This is the current state of google's program, started with zest in 2019, to nowadays be an advertising provider first and not a search-engine-first provider. (RIP Google 1996-2019).

Just click page 2 and start there. Almost no-one does.

the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host sites' ranking signals

We deplore google's objecting to the free market behaviour.

As others have said, Google reeks of being hypocritical.
 
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sxotty

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SEO has broken the internet. Google sucks now. This won't fix things, but at least it's good Google is kinda acknowledging the problem.
Yep. Their search sucks. I don't use it since it is terrible. If enough others quit they will change how it works. I am actually happy to hear of this change and perhaps I'll try it again since this is actually a potential improvement.
 
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