How to Fool Google
Link:
https://www.sitepoint.com/google-algorithms-explained-part-1-dont-be-spam/
The world’s favorite search engine, Google, is known for its high quality results that are calculated by it’s PageRank algorithm. Enormous amounts of time and money have been devoted to make sure Google’s search results are as accurate as possible. Nonetheless, websites have found clever ways to abuse the PageRank algorithm and lift their website in search results to a higher rank than deserved.
One trick that websites used was having a “content farm” publish large numbers of short articles that would link back to their main website. As we know from the PageRank algorithm, this would increase the rank of the main website due to the sheer number of sources that linked to it, even though these content farm articles were of low quality, and often were reposts of other articles. This was a serious problem for Google, as these articles made it more difficult for users to find quality content.
In 2011, Google introduces an update called Panda to combat these content farms. Google targeted these content farm articles by changing their algorithm to prefer longer and original content. As a result, content farm articles dropped out of search results. Moreover, from what we know about PageRank, this most likely caused the rank of the linked article to drop as well, since the in-degree of that article would be much less with the content farm articles filtered out.
This graph shows how one website was hit particularly hard by the Panda update:
Since the Panda update, Google has further refined their search algorithm. They further decreased the score of content farm articles by penalizing over-optimized content (content that has unnaturally high keyword density). In addition, they penalized other unnatural linking schemes, such as the “link wheel”, which consists of many blogs that link to each other in a circle, and all link back to some main website.
I tried applying the Basic PageRank algorithm to this linking scheme, and found that at equilibirum, all of the blogs would have a rank of zero while the main site would receive a rank of 1. Clearly, it is getting ever more difficult to fool Google as they continue to refine their PageRank algorithm, and as a result we can hope to find higher quality content in our search results.