Comment by SteveGerencser
9 months ago
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.
the solution there is to not ban sites, but simply deprioritise them for a while. you get caught being naughty, your entire domain gets hit with a nasty downranking that gradually decays. put a little flag next to the link explaining to the user why the result is so low. except that the second thing will never happen because it seems that Google policy is to keep search users as powerless and uninformed as they possibly can.