[55555]

I was huge into SEO for a few years. I try to stay out of it now, but it's worth noting that this is almost certainly due to the current algorithm's obsession with "freshness." The weaker site is ranking higher with the stolen content because their site was updated more recently. Steal some back and I bet they swap ranks again.

Also, the combination of the pagerank algorithm and normal user behavior typically helps Google to understand who was first and who deserves to rank higher. That is, most people don't plagiarize content, they quote it and then cite the source, which (thanks to pagerank) tends to rank the original better than sites which have plagiarized it.

[scholia]

> the current algorithm's obsession with "freshness."

Which is how Google makes blogspam such a good business to be in, even if your content is inferior to the post you used for "research".

[55555]

Most of the spam I see in the wild these days is indeed (established) dropped domains which were picked up and then loaded with thousands of pages of "fresh" spun content, with an incestuous backlink profile if any. So indeed 'blogspam'. Everything old is new again; it feels just like twelve years ago. Soon people will be keyword stuffing in a font the same color as the background...

But Google certainly isn't intending to make blogspam a good business to be in, and I'd argue that they aren't; over the past four years Demand Media's stockprice has fallen from $400/share to $4, and the general marketplace for commoditized SEO services has shrunk by a similar degree over the same period. 19 out of every 20 SEOs who were active five years ago have thrown in the towel... just check alexa graphs for the top SEO forums.

The SERPs are clean these days. Google has done an amazing job every year for at least thirteen years now of improving them constantly. The new wave of spam is social. In practice this means Buzzfeed writers stealing user-produced content from AskReddit threads and it ending up polluting my Facebook feed to the point that I can't even find any good counterfeit Raybans.

[aaronwall]

"The SERPs are clean these days."

Here's an alternate take on that http://www.johnon.com/1075/bullish-on-seo-rankbrain-vs-seobr...

[scholia]

That's fascinating because I really don't understand it. Maybe I'm just out of touch with SEO, but things like this escape me completely:

"This is because SEOs follow and influence the intent of searchers in the marketplace, while Google’s algorithm (and AI) merely monetizes it."

Where does the extra monetization on page 1 results come from? Unless he's implying that Google provides bad search results so that people will click the ads instead.....

[aaronwall]

There are numerous ways to interpret that. At a base level, one could look at how the mobile search results are sometimes a screen full of ads, or how in some verticals they are a screen full of ads followed by yet another screen full of ads.

And then there is the knowledge graph & other flavors of scrape-n-displace, which is largely content recycled from elsewhere, given prominent positioning not based on merit or editorial quality, but based on who the publisher (or recycler) is.

Another parallel trend would be the confirmation bias / brand bias factors promoting older and staler sites. Or simplified "take" articles in the mainstream media rather than the original source articles on niche hobbyist blogs and forums or such.

And in taking broad sets of new niche intents and trying to guide those streams of users back down well worn paths. For example, sometimes when you want to find a particular news story about a broad & well-known web platform like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, or Google it can be hard to find sites other than the official site. And on some other longtail queries Google rewrites what is being searched for in a way that brings up some results that don't match the true searcher intent. Probably the best example I can come up with on this front is say you wanted a pair of shoes of a specific brand, size, width, and model number. If they are not the most recent and most heavily marketed versions it can be tough. Auto-generated internal search pages on trusted brand sites rank well, while a small retailer carrying that specific shoe might be penalized by Panda.

[userbinator]

the current algorithm's obsession with "freshness."

That explains why I've noticed some older sites which are still around, and have plenty of detailed technical information, seem to have disappeared from the search results. Somewhat sad that the "newer is better" mentality appears to have taken over completely... if I really wanted the newest things I'd look at Google News.

[rspeer]

I guess the problem is, there are some technical fields where old means useless. If I'm googling for Javascript libraries, hardware recommendations, or a fix to a package conflict in Ubuntu, I don't want something from 2010.