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Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

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Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#41

Post by ryukoposting »

Nextgrid wrote: post #19
greenchair wrote: post #10

geo location trick is absolutely fascinating!

And also absolutely trivial to detect automatically. The fact that Google doesn't do it proves they don't give a shit about improving search quality beyond superficial efforts whose main objective is just to make it look like they do. Maybe the fact that most spam sites have Google Analytics & Ads has something to do with it?

Off the top of my head, the most trivial approach is also trivial to defeat. Google sets up a VPN? Just give its IP address special treatment just like you're already doing with the geofencing trick.

The only thing I can think of that'd be tough to deal with is giving that VPN server a second route to the internet, and hiding that behind the biggest consumer CG-NAT you can find. They'll have to use a bogus UA string too.

To be fair, it's well within Google's capabilities. I'm surprised they don't already do something like this, honestly. Trivial? I wouldn't say so.

On a related note: between SEO abuse like this, and the ongoing systematic IP theft by OpenAI, Google, and friends, I worry we're entering an irreversible dark age for the web. Crazy abuses of NAT and UA strings will run rampant, and the only solution will be to serve nothing of value to anyone at all without a paywall.

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#42

Post by julianeon »

Tomte wrote: post #27

> Techopedia started life as a solid tech site. Now, it’s a front for gambling and crypto. When it was penalized, it experienced a massive crash in traffic and rankings. Google actually did something to improve search!

But with that kind of money stream behind it, the mouse can go back to his investors and purchase a tiny mouse jetpack (or whatever the SEO equivalent is) to gain an advantage. If the cat learns to swat that, he'll come back with a toy car. Google is fairly active but eventually they give up: the mouse is a lot more motivated to get his cheese than the cat is to get the mouse. Google can penalize them 10 times in a row, but the 11th time, they win - and they essentially have the bankroll for infinite attempts.

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#43

Post by nisa »

ryukoposting wrote: post #41
Nextgrid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also absolutely trivial to detect automatically. The fact that Google doesn't do it proves they don't give a shit about improving search quality beyond superficial efforts whose main objective is just to make it look like they do. Maybe the fact that most spam sites have Google Analytics & Ads has something to do with it?

Off the top of my head, the most trivial approach is also trivial to defeat. Google sets up a VPN? Just give its IP address special treatment just like you're already doing with the geofencing trick. The only thing I can think of that'd be tough to deal with is giving that VPN server a second route to the internet, and hiding that behind the biggest consumer CG-NAT you can find. They'll have to use a bogus UA string…

Google has caching proxies in every country for almost every ISP. My rural ISP in Germany with only 65k users has it. I'm sure adding this to the contract is not impossible. On the other hand I have no idea how big the amount of data is that Google is moving around for crawling but for some statical sampling it might be enough to use the ASN of these boxes. On the other hand this probably amounts to more abuse Mail for the ISP. Lots of bandwidth that is more expensive for the ISP than Google and it's working directly against having these boxes there in the first place to remove traffic leaving the ISP.

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#44

Post by joecool1029 »

xnx wrote: post #38

The images are too small for me to make out the search terms. It seems like they're casino and crypto related? The whole category is a cess pit. I'm not sure there's any such thing as good rankings in that area. My concern for quality of search results from Google in this category is close to zero.

> My concern for quality of search results from Google in this category is close to zero.

This thinking is the problem.

I'm not sure the best answer is to manually penalize some of the regular players. More will fill their place and it only incentivizes churn and burn behavior.

In short, what I mean to say is you take out big established institutions you consider shady but people are searching for, those people will still seek out even shadier new players to fit their need. It makes them even less safe.

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#46

Post by nothercastle »

summerlight wrote: post #33
wkat4242 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Google is milking them now by just selling ad words, they no longer care about the search results, just how much money they make

This is a prevalent misconception that assumes advertisers don't care about how their money is spent! Advertisers and Google are actually concerned about SEO garbage. Nowadays, most advertisers tend to pay based on # of conversions, its value and ROI. Those spammy sites usually yield a garbage CVR even though their CTR seems great. Advertisers don't like this. Looks like people don't acknowledge that # of clicks is n…

Different groups often look at different metrics. It’s possible that the sales group cares about one value while the dev group optimizes to another

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#47

Post by daft_pink »

summerlight wrote: post #31
daft_pink wrote: post #24

I don’t quite understand why they don’t just let trusted users manually rate search results and feed that through AI to determine ranking penalties similar but not exactly like Kagi.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en They're already doing that with paid quality raters. I suppose your question is about opening this up more widely, but that's basically giving those spammers a tool to directly influence the ranking, which is going to be even worse.

I guess I don’t believe the paid quality raters are actually doing a good job.

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#48

Post by _aavaa_ »

julianeon wrote: post #42
Tomte wrote: post #27

> Techopedia started life as a solid tech site. Now, it’s a front for gambling and crypto. When it was penalized, it experienced a massive crash in traffic and rankings. Google actually did something to improve search!

But with that kind of money stream behind it, the mouse can go back to his investors and purchase a tiny mouse jetpack (or whatever the SEO equivalent is) to gain an advantage. If the cat learns to swat that, he'll come back with a toy car. Google is fairly active but eventually they give up: the mouse is a lot more motivated to get his cheese than the cat is to get the mouse. Google can penalize them 10 times in a r…

Except the mouse only exists in the world because the cat choose to. Google doesn't have to list websites that are bad actors. There's nothing to Optimize if the search engine doesn't list you.
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