{"id":34618,"date":"2022-01-04T15:58:15","date_gmt":"2022-01-04T20:58:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=34618"},"modified":"2022-01-04T15:58:15","modified_gmt":"2022-01-04T20:58:15","slug":"search-engines-and-seo-spam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/04\/search-engines-and-seo-spam\/","title":{"rendered":"Search Engines and SEO Spam"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Seibel<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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A recent small medical issue has highlighted how much someone needs to disrupt Google Search. Google is no longer producing high quality search results in a significant number of important categories.<\/p>\n

Health, product reviews, recipes are three categories I searched today where top results featured clickbait sites riddled with crappy ads. I’m sure there are many more.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’ve long been in the camp saying that Google’s search was way ahead. I’m not sure what’s happened, but in the last few months I’ve noticed a huge decline in the quality of its results. I now regularly repeat my searches with DuckDuckGo to make sure I’m not missing something. Sometimes the problem is SEO spam, where the page I want isn’t on the first page or two of results, but perhaps if I clicked Next enough times I would eventually see it. Other times, I’m searching for something rare, Google only finds a handful of matches, and it appears that the page in question is not even indexed.<\/p>\n\n

frenchyatwork<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I think one of the fundamental things that make search work well about 1-2 decades ago was that web sites would link to each other, and that those links could vaguely correlate with reputation. There were link spammers, but there was actually a some decent organic content as well.<\/p>

What’s happened since then is that almost all the normal “people linking to things they like” has gone behind walled gardens (chiefly Facebook), and vast majority of what remains on the open web are SEO spammers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

ijidak<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Because, years ago, linking to lower reputation sites would drain your page rank.\nSo everyone worried about SEO became afraid to link to anything except:\n1) Their own website 2) High reputation sites like NYTimes, etc.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n