I'm confused about how or why this is a new policy. My memory is inside Google we were discussing this risk back in 2003, probably earlier. Search quality was on it. I just assumed they'd lost the arms race, or that the parasites' ranking was justified for other reasons that were hard to tease apart. What are they doing new now?

I think often about Mahalo, the sleazy shovel content that was spamming the web back in 2007. Google shut that down somewhat fast, although it did take several years. These days with AI and more aggressive spammers it's a losing battle. The real problem is the financial incentives that make this kind of spamming profitable in the first place.

My tiny little blog gets about 3 requests a week for someone to "pay me to run a guest article". Going rate is $50-$200 and again, my blog is tiny.

What's hilarious is when people boast about being "in Forbes" like it's the magazine from 20 years ago, and not this parasitic SEO operation that publishes garbage on anything.

Hopefully this is a step in the right direction. Google's search results have gotten so bad - seems like even some of the simplest searches are just packed with AI generated and SEO garbage. I don't even want SearchGPT do take over the search market space because I'm almost sure it will still be garbage. Just bring back the google from 5-10 years ago please :(.

September thread on Forbes Marketplace and "parasite SEO" (300 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466

One area where Google search is terribly broken is porn.

If your search for some specific term "$foo", nearly every result is just 'search site $bar for "$foo"', taking you to the site's search page, regardless of whether $foo is actually found on the site.