
Google Search is routinely gamed by private blog networks - whalabi
https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-pbns
======
chimen
One of my side projects is battling on a difficult keyword. It's going up and
made it to top 5 after 3 years. I'm monitoring SEO using ahrefs. 1 year ago I
saw a new website going to top position (grammarchecker.net) out of nowhere so
I got interested in finding out their "story".

Domain was new, never saw that website when I researched my competition and it
was on top positions on multiple keywords. The tool itself is nothing but a
wrapper to `languagetool`, stuff that you can see on hundreds of other
websites starting from page 2 in search results.

Digging through the data I was amazed to discover that he's basically running
xrummer to comment on all the possible blogs and forums out there, on
discussions and topics completely unrelated to the target website so yeah
2000's hacks are still valid. 1 year passed and he's still above me.

How are they unable to detect a comment spam towards a new domain? Blog posts
spammed to death with thousands of unrelated comments that even my 8 year old
could spot.

~~~
bhartzer
You see all those xrummer blog comment links and forum links out there... but
that does NOT mean that it's helping. Most likely those links are just there
to hide the links that are actually helping the site rank. That's typically
done in cases such as the one you're describing. If you can spot it, Google
can spot it and just ignores those links.

~~~
dorgo
> but that does NOT mean that it's helping. Most likely those links are just
> there to hide the...

it's not only that they don't help, they could ( and afaik used to ) damage
reputation/ranking. But maybe this changed in recent years.

~~~
plorkyeran
My understanding is that they used to damage your ranking, but then people
realized that spamming links to _competing_ sites was an easy way to improve
your ranking, so Google stopped.

------
bluepeter
As a legit biz trying to win legit links, this is such a hassle to deal with.

Perhaps even worse is the rise of "barely legal" blogs... (though these may be
the same thing as PBN I suppose), but, by these, I mean, sure, they're
original content, original "reviews," and "legitimate" blogs.

But the articles are pumped out en masse, often written in sub-par English,
with nothing more than re-wording of a reviewed site's "about us" page.
(Perhaps they're even training Markov models on reviewed sites' content?) But
they increasingly dominate searches, particularly in the B2B and B2C tech
space.

Do these serve customers' search intent? They're simple gateway pages: the
content is often not really "readable." But since Google favors "reviews" and
pages that link to many other top 10 SERPs, they dominate, vs legit product
pages.

Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists. Just
endless lists of "alternatives to X," and "rankings of XYZ products" (with
next to no legit reviews), or "here's the stack this company uses." All
designed to get widespread long tail links.

~~~
whalabi
(OP here)

OpenAI recently demonstrated a frighteningly high quality text generator[1]
which leaves me concerned about the future.. humanity of the web - no more of
those sub-par English articles if a bot writes for you.

Makes me think we'll inevitably see large tracts of the web near-fully
automated - information gathering (research) and text generation (writing) for
articles based on a simple prompt for that spark of creativity.

Next ten years sure will be interesting on the web.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/17/openai-text-generator-
dang...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/17/openai-text-generator-dangerous/)

~~~
Bombthecat
Who says, that your comment isn't a bot already?

Internet is really turning into a low trust society... I guess network sites
with only your friends will become more important then. With probably even
bigger niche conspiracy and antivaxx bubbles then now..

~~~
dorgo
>Who says, that your comment isn't a bot already?

Why do people care whether a human or a bot wrote a comment / draw a picture /
developed software.. ? The only relevant metric is the quality of the comment
/ picture / software, isn't it?

[https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/)

~~~
cameronbrown
Because humans are social creatures. Talking to a bot, even an incredibly
accurate one, isn't the same.

Tech like deepfakes or generated text is going to require us all to
cryptographically sign content in the future. I foresee a time where white
house press releases must be signed by the president just to confirm its real
content.

~~~
bennyelv
That doesn't quite solve the problem unfortunately. If this is the only
solution then the subject of some content can repudiate it by not signing it,
even if it did actually happen.

For example if the president was filmed saying something in public he later
wanted to deny, he could just claim it was faked. The person who filmed it
could sign it, but who are they and what authority do they have to claim that
they didn't fake it?

------
Matsta
I see the OP submitted this article.

To be honest, PBN's are nowhere near as effective as they were a couple of
years ago. The chance of getting a manual action against your site is a lot
higher.

If you were going to drop a few thousand dollars on buying backlinks, you
don't want to have your site de-indexed by Google in 6 months without getting
an ROI.

Non-English versions of Google are more linens and are still easy to game for
PBN's.

Also, all PBN's are not all created equally. Making sure the domain isn't
dropped, different whois details/domain registrars/hosting providers. Also
putting relevant links to sites other than what clients have paid for to make
this look more legitimate.

Niches with big competition like Pharma/Gambling/Game Hacks/Lead Gen will
continue to user PBN's, but bigger SEO's will be diversifying their link
building portfolio by building more whitehat links like guest posts and then
sending more questionable links like PBN's to them as a tier 2 backlink.

~~~
Cthulhu_
On that note, there's also a technique, forgot the name, but it's basically
anti-SEO where they intentionally push a competitor's pages onto a PBN with
the intent of getting it detected (and penalized) by Google.

~~~
Matsta
It's called negative SEO. There was a Google update that is a bit more lenient
so your competitors can't negatively spam your site.

Unless your competitor had some serious dosh to mass spam your site on PBN's,
they would most likely being using a tool like Xrumer or GSA where you can
purchase a 100k backlink blast for as little as $5

~~~
dmix
Companies are actively engaging in negative SEO all the time too. My friend
used to work at a shady SEO shop in Florida and they used it often. Their
clients don’t seem to care how it gets there since they mostly pushing
affiliate ads, not a sustainable long term business.

------
richardw
Search for "<my area> plumber" returns totally gamed results. Has for years.
No idea why that obvious use case is so broken. My wife hired one and the
plumber was useless so I investigated. I've found obvious spam nests of
multiple sites with duplicate styling and nothing seems to have changed.

~~~
praptak
You can report these to Google:
[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1)

Edit: better link:
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en)

~~~
gnulinux
I've been reporting things like this for years and never seen anything change
for better. I'm not saying Google doesn't care, but it seems like they cannot
tell apart signal from noise so they can't fix these scams.

~~~
huffmsa
No money in it. My unsubstantiated guess is that being part of the search team
became uncool a while back because it wasn't new and shiny.

~~~
NewsAware
Something like "[myarea] open locked door" can have Google ad bids in the
range of 30$,so there may be money in there for Google not caring for quality
organic results

~~~
Scoundreller
Whenever a company pisses me off, I turn off my adblocker, do a few searches
for them or that industry, and click their ads whenever they appear.

I also like to see who’s advertising because it shows which
industries/companies compete on marketing, instead of their own merits.

It really shows which products have high marginal profits.

~~~
cameronbrown
> I also like to see who’s advertising because it shows which
> industries/companies compete on marketing, instead of their own merits.

Quite frankly this is wrong. You can have all the merits in the world, but if
people don't know about it then you're out of business.

> It really shows which products have high marginal profits.

AdWords can be life or death enough that it's worth eating the cost because
the alternative is not having a business.

~~~
cwkoss
> You can have all the merits in the world, but if people don't know about it
> then you're out of business.

With the rise of social media, this is about 20 years out of date. If you have
a great product and 100 users, 1000 people are going to see glowing
testimonials at zero cost.

~~~
cameronbrown
I strongly disagree. You're thinking purely from a software point of view -
advertising is still extremely useful for any kind of local business or
startup.

------
AndrewStephens
I've had my entire site cloned by scammers looking for content. I fought back
by continuing to publish boring and ill-written posts that no one wants to
read. That shut them down after a few months.

I don't know why they bothered. As this article notes, content is cheap. You
can always find someone to write empty words for pennies. I can see no easy
way for Google to combat this apart from boosting trusted sites.

One way to try to raise your PageRank is to submit your own articles to
HackerNews, like whalabi just did. Nothing wrong with that - I've done it
myself - but it didn't work for me.

~~~
fasicle
Isn't one of the key ranking factors time users spend on the page? Wouldn't
poorly written / empty worded articles cause users to bounce quickly thus
causing them to rank poorly?

~~~
AndrewStephens
> Isn't one of the key ranking factors time users spend on the page?

In the original PageRank? No.

These days, who knows? But Google only knows how long people stay on the page
using Google Analytics and many sites (mine, for instance) don't use it.

I am a quick reader and are very good at quickly skimming articles. I hope
Google doesn't rank pages based on time spent, since Google would be
optimizing their search away from my preferences.

~~~
_Understated_
I researched Google's algorithm a while back and a a fairly strong ranking
factor IS how long they spend on your page/site (whether you have GA or not)
but that can backfire. (I know that Google's exact algorithm is unknown but
it's based on experiments by SEO sites)

Here's how I understood it to work:

If a user finds you on a Google search and then clicks the link, Google times
how long it takes for you to come back to the search results. So if you
immediately backed out of the page they would take that as meaning the result
was crap and they took that into account in their algorithm. The thinking
being that it was an irrelevant result.

However, that counts against sites that provide the answer you want right at
the top of the page so that when you open the page, the answer is staring you
in the face... so obviously you are going to back out again as you have your
answer.

This was from around two years ago when I was researching building an indexer
and search engine for kicks so my memory of how it worked is fuzzy.

Also, it may have changed.

~~~
DrScientist
The way I navigate google results is go down the google list and to open each
of the ones I want to check in new tab.

That way I don't to wait for the pages to load, as they load while I'm
launching the next etc.

Then I go through the tabs, closing the ones that are useless.

Not sure how Google would deal with this.

~~~
eclipxe
If only Google had a technology that would preload the top results (maybe
coming from a Google CDN) and show them right on the search results page. I’d
be AMP’ed for that.

------
bhartzer
They are not called “dropped domains”, the term used more often is “expired
domains”. The author doesn’t even mention how registrars are a player and part
of this, as they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are
dropped.

Google has done a lot since 2011 to identify pbns and take them down. This
article seems a bit outdated.

~~~
Matsta
Agreed. Also the forum he's referencing to is BlackHatWorld for those curious.

It's well known that some of the sellers on there are artificially inflating
their views and replies, and a few of the top sellers are probably using
hacked logins to write reviews (their database was leaked a few years ago:
[https://hacked-
emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhat...](https://hacked-
emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhatworld-com/))

For example, take a look at this thread:
[https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/captain-jack-
sparrow-2019-...](https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/captain-jack-
sparrow-2019-200-premium-foundation-linksdevil-circuit-rank-
boostersummer-50-off.654231/page-362)

Thousands of replies that all sound very similar "Order confirmed Transaction
ID: XXX"

~~~
maaaats
Their job is to automatically distribute content on fake blogs and fake social
media profiles, not too far out to think they do the same with their own
services, pumping them with comments from fake profiles.

The first post on the first page of that thread is an interesting read, what a
way to market your services.

------
krisroadruck
I gave a talk on how to properly set up PBNs / Site Networks way back in 2011
[https://youtu.be/r23NYXiorUo](https://youtu.be/r23NYXiorUo)

The thing is, this mostly stopped being relevant about 2ish years later circa
2013-2014. Google massively improved its ability to identify and penalize or
discount these things.

You can still make effective PBNs to this day, but the cost to get them to
pass the google sniff test is basically on par with just doing legitimate
marketing, but carries additional risk.

Given that, most of the serious search marketers I know have long since
abandoned these crappy tactics in favor of serving searcher intent and earning
relevant links through smart content promotion and outreach. Folks who still
buy and sell this stuff are mostly people who haven't updated their skills in
a very long time, or those that prey on the same.

~~~
jaequery
Can you elaborate on how getting your content promoted and outreached?

~~~
krisroadruck
There are a large number of effective tactics available, but really you have
to pick and choose them based on the niche/budget/funnel position/search
intent/search features of a particular query/ect.

Some common example tactics include:

Broken Backlink Building: Create high quality page, then look for pages that
have historically served the same searcher intent and attracted backlinks but
are now no longer available and reach out to sites that linked to that and
offer them the newer resource to fix their broken link.

Skyscraper technique: Make a list of similar pages that serve same search
intent as a term or topic you are going after, sorted by relevance and links
earned. Make a significantly better page, then reach out to webmasters linking
to the other resource and suggest your better/more-up-to-date/relevant to
readers link as an alternative.

Social Proof Pitch: Before promoting your content to Journo's and Bloggers,
try to get it to the top of a subreddit or the reddit homepage or otherwise
demonstrate its popularity on other social networks. Then when you pitch it
you can point to it likely being a useful resource. Also works if the thing
you got to do well socially is a stub of a story and you offer to write in-
depth about it or about an important part of a larger story as a guest post.

Citable elements:

Make otherwise hard-to-link-to pages like landing pages easier to link to by
adding relevant citable elements (charts, graphs, facts & figures) that
bloggers and journo's may wish to reference.

Unlinked Brand Mentions:

Set up alerts for any time your brand is mentioned. If you see one that isn't
a link but a link would be relevant in the context of the article, ask the
author to make the mention a link.

HARO / SourceBottle / Reporter Connection:

Make yourself available as a subject matter expert to reporters, and when
giving expert quotes, reference deeper explanations in articles already
present on your site.

Reverse Guest Post: Pay or entice industry authority/influencer to write
something on your site to attract additional eyeballs to your other content.

Topical Interviews / Industry Round-ups / Guest Speaking ( podcasts, video,
conferences): Go places where relevant audiences already exist and get them
interested in hearing more from you.

Get Friendly with Pirates: Use copyscape or reverse image search to find
people who are using your content or images without proper attribution.
Instead of sending take-down requests, ask that they credit, with a link the
source and or do a cross domain rel canonical to the original content.

And so on, and so forth. Good Search marketers have a wide variety of tactics
at their disposal. Great search marketers will only apply the relevant ones
rather than trying to offer clients one-size-fits all strategies.

Edit: A lot of these are much easier with the help of some tools like ahrefs,
semrush, pitchbox/buzzstream, hunter.io and the like.

~~~
superasn
Thanks I have favorited your comment in case I need to revisit this when I
learn SEO for my site.

I see a lot of stuff you quote is from Brian dean (afaik?), but is there any
other site, or author from where you are learning this?

~~~
krisroadruck
Brian Dean as far as I know didn't invent anything I listed above, with the
exception I think of coming up with a name for the skyscraper technique. He
has however done a great job over the years of collecting various tactics,
strategies and research methods and publishing them in a nice digestible
format.

I've been in the space since 2009 and most of what I know I learned via trial
and error, just setting up test sites to see what works (see my linked video
from 2011 for more on that). That said there is a really nice community in the
SEO space with people eager to share whats worked for them or put their own
spin on widely adopted tactics and strategies.

Off the top of my head I'd recommend Ahrefs (both their blog as well as their
YouTube channel), Backlinko (that'd be Brian Dean), SEO by the Sea (mostly
digging into google patents and trying to understand their implications for
search), Moz, anything by Nick Eubanks, Cyrus Shepard, ViperChill, Ross
Hudgens, Garret French or Jon Cooper.

One thing to keep in mind is a lot of stuff goes out of fashion pretty
quickly. If you are reading a post about SEO from a few years ago, double
check to make sure its still in line with best practices and effective. If it
seems like a short-term tactic it's probably best avoided regardless. And
above all else, don't assume because some SEO Guru said a thing is a thing
that it is indeed a thing. Test everything. Google doesn't give a manual for
how to rank and they make changes to the algorithm regularly, so everyone is
making educated guesses. There are many schools of thought inside the SEO
industry. When in doubt, test it out.

~~~
superasn
Thank you for the insights! One last question if you don't mind..

Have you ever paid for buying links? I know it is against Google's policy but
SEO companies I talked to before I decided to learn it myself told me that 18
out of 100 links are paid links (with maybe 2 free links as every SEO guy is
doing broken lb, etc so free links are mostly taken). They said they can even
get me links from some pretty big sites if I had the budget for it.

Is that true? Would love to hear your thoughts.

------
rdtwo
A good example is the entire category of “Gardening”. The real content is
nearly impossible to find and it’s completely full of blog spam and low
quality generic content. The keywords must be valuable so it’s a good
indicator of how bad google search has gotten.

~~~
blunte
And it's an uphill battle to teach "regular people" to not simply click one of
the top links on Google and believe what it says. This is especially true for
health and wealth topics.

Sadly, it seems most people cannot distinguish between content provided by
people with a genuine interest and knowledge between "content" of no substance
or authority.

~~~
rdtwo
A lot of the garbage content is designed to look like real content and it can
often take 10-20 seconds to figure out that the generated content is just
fluff and offers nothing new or useful. That’s probably long enough for google
to accept it as good content.

In gardening this is especially true because one could simply copy the text on
the back of a seed packet and add filler words to make a paragraph. For a lot
of these types of topics and blogs google should really look at re-engagement
scores.

How many many times the user comes back to the same page, how many times it’s
bookmarked and how often the user views other content on the page.

That being said I think google is probably complicit in reducing search
quality because doing so Allows them to present many times the number of ads.
If it takes 20-30 websites and multiple searches to find a decent article on
growing strawberries then they would have generated that much extra ad
revenue. There isn’t an incentive to get search right, just right enough that
they are better than bing and that’s not a hard metric to beat.

------
chewz
Google Search occasionaly delivers useful results.

But DDG in my native language? OMG. 99% results is machine generated, machine
translated fake sites. It feels like walking in endless landfill.

------
davidy123
What I notice is that Google routinely returns fairly random sites that simply
take Wikipedia's content and game SEO so they show up for "wiki <term>." Those
results come and go. Google clearly does a lot of customisation for particular
concerns, given how important Wikipedia is, I'm surprised to see these
occasional results.

~~~
llao
Also Stackoverflow/Stackexchange clones. With automatic translations. Really
really bad translations.

------
cfv
One of my first freelancing gigs was for a guy who maintained one of these.

He peddled this pills and had built an impressive (by 2009 standards) network
of 87 WP installs with generated crap in them that linked heavily with each
other, all on this OVH instance and had managed to break one of the plugins he
used for this purpose, so he posted a bid on GetAFreelancer, which I won and
never saw a cent for.

I'm still really pissed about that for some reason.

~~~
ErikAugust
Which reminds me of a golden rule of freelancing: If they do scummy things,
they’ll probably do scummy things to you.

------
emerongi
A lot of search results in my native language return totally garbage results
where clearly they just scraped for keywords and then threw them on a site.
Another tactic is to Google Translate articles from other languages, which
obviously ends with a totally unreadable post, but it still ranks well because
it hits some keywords.

It's actually weird that these rank so high. The very least Google used to do
well was to filter this garbage. I can understand them losing the SEO battle,
but that they fail to filter straight-up spam is quite interesting.

------
huffmsa
The big G has gotten comfortable and complacent atop their throne.

Search quality has been on the decline for a while now, but in the past 3-6
months it's gotten really really bad for anything that isn't mainstream and
popular.

I have more "showing results for XYZ, do you want to see results for your
actual query QRS?" than just showing QRS.

Yeah, I do, that's why I typed it.

> _10 results for QRS. Still irrelevant and excluding words, even in quotes_

The search team must have lost a lot of talent recently, it's amateur hour.

------
gwbas1c
Years ago, I once googled my name to find someone with the same name in the UK
who was a bit of a fluffy motivational speaker. I laughed, and forgot about
him.

A few months later, I googled my name and all that came up were fluffy blog
entries he wrote on various generic blogs. They were all slightly different.
He pushed me off the front page.

Granted, I don't really care about being found online. (Just leads to too much
spam, recruiters are the worst.) But, a few days later I happened to be on
Google's campus and someone who tracked those things struck up a conversation
with me. I politely pointed out the gimmick that the other person did.

Normally, I don't like pulling strings, but I certainly had the last laugh at
that one!

~~~
luckylion
How do they say? Big if true!

Unless it was a general algorithmic change that took care of that, manually
intervening in the Serps for personal favors would be completely against
Google's stated rules. If possible (I have some doubts), it's probably a nice
side gig for employees, since rankings are easily worth millions.

~~~
lgats
A Manual Action would be more probable
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en)

------
reallydontask
Interestingly enough my blog that had little traffic (at best 15000 page views
and probably 2 or 3 comments per month) also had some posts cloned. Not even
necessarily the most popular ones.

The cloned posts ranked higher than my blog posts

------
smt88
It seems like a consequence of the search engine monopoly is that the SEO side
of the arms race only has one target.

If we had many important engines with many algorithms, it might dilute any
particular tactic that SEO uses.

~~~
luckylion
They would likely work in a similar way, being susceptible to the same
tactics.

Imho, the main problem is that there's no deterrent. Even if you get caught
doing some very black hat stuff, worst thing that can happen is to get a
manual penalty. Remove the outlawed stuff, wait a month or two, submit a
reinclusion request and you're back in business. If it was a "once you're
caught, you're out for good" thing, SEOs would tread much more carefully.

~~~
smt88
I disagree that they'd work the same way because Google has invested millions
of person-hours into a proprietary algorithm that they share with no one.

DDG and Bing often have wildly differing results for me.

~~~
luckylion
That's true, but I believe that they'd arrive at similar techniques if they
were rivaling Google. Today, it's a Cyborg-Behemoth vs a few scrap-yard
tinkerers. If Bing & DDG had the budget and manpower Google has, the results
would probably become more similar - but who knows, there might be completely
different approaches to search that we just haven't seen.

In any case, we probably do agree that it would be very good in general if
there was more competition in the search market.

------
superasn
Google is to blame as much as these people who are gaming their search.

The number one tip most SEO blogs cite these days is to use AMP. It can
skyrocket a crummy site over a non AMP site with much better content for many
trending keywords.

I find that this type of thing is equivalent to gaming the search results as
it would be by doing low quality blogs. Just this time the hack is offered by
the G itself.

------
d7
I think they are boosting ranking for Google Aanalytics integrated sites with
DoubleClick cookies running. If you remove or change analytics Google tanks
your ranking. I ran experiments including google ads for a few months a couple
of years ago. They set me up with an account manager who moved me to a new
analytics account that added Doubleclick cookies. I've been trying to remove
the advertising cookies since then and it's impossible from within the
Analytics console. If I plug in a new Analytics account my SEO placement
tanks. I feel like it's a racket that gives away my site's user data in
exchange for rankings. Help!

------
cryptica
It's definitely all about capital now. The algorithms are just not smart
enough to make accurate judgements in such a competitive landscape... It might
have worked a few decades ago when competition was low, but now the idea that
an algorithm can outsmart an army of human SEO experts is ridiculous.

I wonder if things would be better if Google went back to the old approach of
Yahoo which involved hiring humans to manually rank the pages (at least
partially). I think search results would be significantly better.

~~~
Scoundreller
In a way, google does. They track which result you click on, and how long you
stay on that page.

If google knows who the robots are, and who the humans are, there’s a lot more
human input to outweigh a human SEO team managing a team of bots.

And google can probably determine which users are best at determining page
value and weight their input highly.

------
qwerty456127
Always. I had been in touch with this industry until 2010 and that was as easy
(and profitable) as if it was a feature, intended this way. Later on, as far
as I know, algorithms have changes a couple of times but that didn't change
much, just minor inconvenience SEO guys routinely adapt to. If I didn't care
about people's jobs and wasn't libertarian I'd say SEO should be outlawed.

------
zepto
It seems like a pretty straightforward way to improve search for the end user
would be to allow end user personalization.

For example search results could include ‘prioritize results from this site’,
and ‘never show results from this site’ as options on each result.

As far as I can see the only reason this kind of search customization is not
offered is because it would undermine Google’s business model.

~~~
maaaats
It was possible years ago I think? Vaguely remember to having blocked experts-
exchange, quora and other you-must-be-a-member-to-actually-see-the-content
pages

~~~
zepto
Yes - they experimented with this a while back. But they dropped it because it
works against the business model.

------
Animats
If Google cared about this, they could fix it. They don't have an adequate
system for checking business legitimacy. If they tried hard to filter out the
domains that have no identifiable real-world business behind them, or which
are way too publicized for their real world size, they could fix this.

------
calibas
So long as you use an algorithm to rank content, people will be able to
reverse-engineer it and game Google Search results. Of course, without an
algorithm I have no idea how they could possibly rank billions of web pages.

~~~
i_am_nomad
"As soon as you define a metric to measure a goal, the metric itself becomes
the goal." I'm sure I'm mangling that quotation, but that's the phenomenon
you're describing, or at least a close relative of it.

~~~
Majromax
You're looking for Goodhart's Law
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)):
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

------
tareqak
Over the last few months, I've had a thought that only very recently I've been
able to put into words: it's more profitable to appear to be a source of truth
than it is to actually be a source of truth.

~~~
dredmorbius
This generalises. True value is expensive _both_ to create _and_ assess.

The tricksters arbitrage both sides of this exchange. -- the producers and
consumers.

And yes, sometimes the deception may be in appearing to be something not
valuable but instead high-risk: bluff threats, imitation of poisonous or
stinging animals or insects, inflatable tanks.

"All warfare is based on deception."

[https://suntzusaid.com/book/1](https://suntzusaid.com/book/1)

------
mtnGoat
i have learned that a lot of terms, specially ones worth money, have been
gamed in google for almost a decade. it's really not hard to do at all. If i
know i am searching for a competitive term, i will sometimes try bing instead.
it has been gamed as well.

------
jacknews
grrrr

there's -> there are

~~~
whalabi
Bad habit of mine :)

Thanks for the heads-up

