Comment by suddenclarity
9 months ago
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.
Google's job is to fight abusers to give you good results. Is that not the point of a search engine? What else are they going to spend their time working on?
Putting the burden of SEO on everyone else is going to cause people to abandon making websites and seek other platforms like reddit, facebook, instagram, youtube etc... as they have been.
It also wasn't as heavily weighted to manually trusted domains before. I used to have a bunch of backlinks too, but all blogs/forums were manually downranked.
Now these "trusted" domains get free reign to do whatever they want like this.