[throwaway2245]

The principle of 'obscurity is not security' would seem to apply to anti-spam algorithms on the scale of Google.

I suspect that Google are not claiming this law would interfere with their anti-spam efforts, simply because it wouldn't - they can't justify it.

If that was a real concern, why wouldn't they mention it, for example in this lengthy blog post? It's a good public defence for them.

The fact that they don't say it, means that I infer the opposite.

[graeme]

Security by obscurity replied to hacking. You don’t hack google. You’re analogizing from the completely wrong situation.

The closer analogy is stock trading. Prices move on news. If you have advance knowledge of news, you’re rich. If you learn, for example, that google will soon start favouring links from aged domains, then you buy as many aged domains as you can.

If you learn that google will devalue links from aged domains, then you have two weeks to rid your network of such links.

And if you are a spammer who gets this information from australian news insiders, then you can beat your competition by moving faster.

When the algo changes are released to everyone at once, it’s like how stock markets function: everyone learns the same thing at the same time.

As for why they don’t mention it, perhaps it is too complex to explain in what is clearly a complex topic. Most people who don’t build websites have no idea of the cat and mouse that goes on with seo.

Are you seriously denying that spammers game search engines and try to keep up with algorithms? Look up the black hat seo industry.

It’s on par with denying programmers use keyboards or something. You’re trying to deny a fundamental fact of reality.

Or watch some of Matt Cutt’s videos. He was the public face of googles rules and algorithm changes. His role? Head of webspam

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Cutts

[throwaway2245]

> Security by obscurity replied to hacking

Considering that Wikipedia dates the concept and its rejection back to 1851, you have understood it wrong.

[graeme]

....I wasn’t saying security by obscurity only applies to computers. I was saying it’s not the right concept for webspam.

Once an algo change is put into practice, it’s fairly easy for the seo industry to see what it is. It is no longer obscure!

But if you have advance notice of a change, you can react in advance, much like you can trade in advance of stock price moves if you have insider information.

[madsbuch]

Neither stock pricing or search rankings should be seems as a game. Your perspective is adversarial. Please, for the sake of humanity, let's try to be more ambitious than this.

Stock pricing should, in its core, be about valuing an asset.

Search rankings should, in its core, be about providing most relevant material to a query.

[graeme]

People absolutely are adversarial in these situations. Google rankings are valuable, so people try to game them, and google tries to fend them off with algorithm changes.

You can’t wave a wand to stop that. I’m describing the world as it is, not advocating how it ought to be.