

Ask HN: Did Google shoot themselves in the foot by creating and promoting SEO? - frigg

The job of a good search engine is to return the best possible results for the user. What Google did was tell content creators some of the signals they use to rank pages.<p>Some of these content creators used and abused this and got better rankings. I see many fake sites built just to link to one site, people asking for or buying links (like in the case of rap genius but which we don&#x27;t hear about) and other tricks to get good rankings.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it had been better not to give such power to content creators and just tell them to build good content that people want to read?
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wmf
Mostly Google does tell people to create good content, but there are still
swarms of SEOers who will try to reverse-engineer Google's algorithms
regardless of how much or little information Google releases.

