| I am seeing questions about why this is a big deal? The issue is that CNN is using their domain authority to boost this drivel affiliate Money content, and hiding the fact that they are doing it by using layer 7 routing to cloak the site. If CNN used a subdomain, e.g. money.cnn.com, Google could learn that this content should be judged independently from the rest of the site. This money content isn’t competing fairly. Google is being tricked to think these Money articles should have the same inherent authority as other CNN articles. Where this impacts the consumer is that the first articles for popular search terms aren’t the best, but instead written by content marketers chasing the highest affiliate. This crowds out legitimate sites (e.g. in depth reviews of the best mortgage lenders) because they can’t hope to rank higher than CNN for the same term. At the very least, this “path based” cloaking of content authorship should be detectable by Google, but it’s a game of whack a mole, unfortunately. I think if you had a human curate the best content written for these popular SEO’d search terms, they’d be able to find the diamonds from the rough. That gives some hope that algorithms can improve to rank the most useful content for readers. It’s also why Reddit is so popular as a source of content in Google. |