[tiew9Vii]

I find this. It has a bias towards large commercial news/ecommerce sites/daily fresh content. Great for the majority of browsers but for programming and other hobbies of mine the real content I want are in niche small blogs/forums that don’t get up ranked liked they used to so drop off the index.

[drivingmenuts]

Consider, though, that a lot of those big sites are there because of various tricks to push theselves up in ranking because they have money that the small, niche sites don’t.

The little guys don’t really have a chance, unless you have a search engine specifically biased toward them.

[mirimir]

See https://uk.pcmag.com/news-analysis/120580/how-a-vpn-review-s... for discussion of major trickage.

[mxd3]

The only “trick” here is that the author of the website has a fake name. Otherwise, having good content that people link to is not a trick.

[mirimir]

No, there was more to it than that. I spent some time, last year, looking into those pay-for-rating VPN "review" sites. And Google displayed some very odd behavior in searches involving TheBestVPN.com and VPN services that had paid it for top rankings.

I'm no SEO guru, but I suspect that some of those VPN services created numerous clones, which all linked to TheBestVPN.com, and so improved its ranking. For example, ExpressVPN had at least 128 clones. Such as expressvpn..., buy-express-vpn-..., get-xpress-vpn...., and xpress-vpn.... I used myip.ms to get hosting information, and they were linked. Also, I bought subscriptions from a few of them, and they all provided working ExpressVPN apps, with the right certificates. And I found no evidence of affiliate codes in the traffic.