Comment by codexon
9 months ago
I still believe the original title is warranted.
The fact that Google has to manually step in to intervene or else the big domains get all the top rankings tells you that they are very heavily biased towards big media domains.
does it?
I would happily believe that Google is corrupt in this manner, but the reason big domains have the advantage here is because they can afford to pay teams of people with the express purpose of gaming the system. this is true in all industries, everywhere, and it can only be fixed with society-wide change, which, short of a world war (or, more likely, two), isn't going to happen
It's not about being corrupt, it is about doing the lazy thing in order to fight spam. No one ever got fired for suggesting New York Times or Better Housekeeping.
To me it feels like a big brand website hardly needs to try in order to rank #1 even without doing a bunch of SEO.
> It's not about being corrupt, it is about doing the lazy thing in order to fight spam. No one ever got fired for suggesting New York Times or Better Housekeeping.
> To me it feels like a big brand website hardly needs to try in order to rank #1 even without doing a bunch of SEO.
To rub salt into the wound, any forum will happily let anyone and everyone post in support of any big brand, but instantly spam-block some lone developer trying to showcase their product (HN is different in this regard).
Microsoft/Jetbrains/Apple releases a new paid product, available as a paid subscription only - dozens of people will get upvoted telling the forum about it.
Some lone indie dev releases a free-tier search tool with optional paid tier, and they're banned for spamming.
Now I understand why you'd want to block people who self-advertise, but there's gotta be a middle ground.
Why is advertising on behalf of a company that has a larger ad budget than all the current readers salaries combined okay, but advertising for your own product is a bannable offence?
There really should be a middle ground where (like on HN) the audience understands that someone who posts something that took them 6 months to create is not the same as someone selling love potions or stock tips.
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Big brand websites usually have decades of trust and backlinks to lean back upon. As a person working in SEO for 20 years, I'd argue calling search engines lazy is just lazy. It's a billion dollar industry. Whatever ranking factor they decide on, someone will abuse.
Consider how bad the results would be if I could generate 100 scam sites in a day and outrank traditional media. Only to repeat it tomorrow. Now step it up and have tens of thousands of people doing the same thing. Every day. Trusting a 30 year old domain isn't lazy.
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Years ago Google banned BMW (I think) for their then very spammy tactics. Then they were forced to restore BMW because people searching for BMW expected to find BMW in the results.
The Google spam team has always been underfunded, and understaffed, and when the choice was 'do the right thing about spam' vs 'do the thing that is profitable', they always choose profit.
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