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by speedplane 3141 days ago
If you want a specific example, here's one that came up in the news recently. Try searching for "rasberry ketones", a nutritional supplement. It's filled with hyper tuned SEO pages with very little content. Many suggest they are informational, but are really article/adverts tuned for search engines. Even those that appear on ostensibly legit websites have ridiculously click-baity titles like "What They Don’t Want You to Know About Raspberry Ketones", which in my mind raises red flags that BS is ahead.

If you read a newspaper, you clearly know when someone is trying to sell you something, but on Google search, you don't. I don't mind being marketed to, but I would like to know when I'm marketed to, and the vast majority of google results are organic search marketing.

2 comments

Interestingly, I just searched for it and the results are:

DDG: 1. WebMD 2. Walmart 3. examine.com 4. Wikipedia 5. Amazon 6. some site apparently dedicated to r.k. 7. livescience.com 8. some webshop 9. HuffPo with the clickbait title you mentioned 10. Some kind of webmd clone

Google: 1. WebMD 2. healthline.com 3. examine.com 4. Dr. Axe (no idea what this is but doesn't seem to be purely spam) 5. livescience.com 6. Wikipedia 7. HuffPo clickbait 8. Some kind of webshop 9-10. Amazon

I wouldn't say it all spam, though there are questionable sites in top 10, but there are also a number of legit ones.

I note though "rasberry ketones" is not a correct spelling, it should be "raspberry". Maybe that's the reason you've got bad results?

Interesting, thanks. Did you ever manage to find better-quality material on raspberry ketones that you think should have been in the search results instead?
Yes, I did, although it took quite some time.
Would you mind sharing a link or two?