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by KptMarchewa 1482 days ago
There was way less SEO back then. If they continued to use the old algorithm, your results would be worse than what you have now.
3 comments
b112 1482 days ago
What are you saying?!

There was loads of SEO back in 2000 even! It brought alta vista to its knees, the number one search engine of the day.

Google got started, grew, because it filtered all that SEO spammy junk.

Do you have specific stats to back this up? Number of SEO pages vs good ones?

Or are you just presuming?

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IshKebab 1482 days ago
You're both right. There was loads back then but there was also way less than now.
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Retric 1482 days ago
Page rank wasn’t a pure algorithmic solution in 2006 either.

So, while the problem changed I am not sure if it got harder or Google’s priorities shifted.

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jotm 1482 days ago
Doubt it. Even today, obvious spammy content aggregators show up for many keywords with stuff taken directly from Reddit/Stackoverflow/Superuser/etc.

All of Google's fancy ML could've been replaced with a simple report button - enough people report a site and either trigger a manual review (best option) or just ban them (could be used against competitors... but negative SEO was already a thing and is still widely used).

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