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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

They pretty much lost the war against content farms already. I'm not sure the content indexing & crawling model they have is even adapted to the current web.

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What makes you think they ever waged a war? I never saw any indication.

Well, there were algorithm changes like Panda 12 years ago...

12 Years is a long time... fighting "the previous war" doctrine type results. Not to dismiss any non-public changes, but never the less, search results quality has suffered. Maybe search results isn't their funnel to relevant ads but rather they want to serve up ads while skipping the quality results step most people expect.

Matt Cutts made it seem like they were serious about it. On reflection, his departure seems like a turning point, albeit perhaps coincidental.

I think they did at the beginning, there's been a lot of algorithm changes before but once they realized they were losing, they just gave up.

The incentives are just not aligned anyways, Google Search gets its money from the ad links on the top, they don't really lose anything if the links below are half terrible...

They will never fight that war again. Just follow the money: google has all the reasons to tolerate SEOs, since these SEO linkfarms are filled to the brim with ads, conveniently sold by google!

I'd be surprised if anyone at google would understand that to be a problem, because "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

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