https://alexskra.com/blog/the-mermaid-is-taking-over-google-search-in-norway/
We've seen rampant spam in the Danish search results as well. Very well done and amazing they are able to rank that many pages.
It was on HackerNews and got a bit of attention, looks like it got enough attention for them to switch the site off for a bit or permanently until they can shift it to another domain
Looks like .dk domains are a major part of the mix
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27991322
To back out a few steps, do you think that in general Google is getting better, or worse?
I was thinking this morning of when Matt Cutts and... Sean(???) blanking on the name had a bit of a dustup over Farmer/Panda and I had to completely agree with Matt. The SERPs had become unusable and awful and Google had to do something. The next few years saw huge jumps in quality.
Since then, we hear a lot about tech upgrades and Rank Brain and this and that. I've certainly seen sites rise and fall, but sometimes I've seen bad sites rise.
A couple of years ago, local travel/tourism searches were being dominated by terrible automated pages from the OTAs. The pictures they matched with the destination was wrong. The info was terrible. So some sites rose and some fell, but objectively the results were not better. So the competitor sites (in this case one I managed) did worse, but really didn't deserve it (it was not a good site, but it was better than the bad pages that rose for some specific terms).
Typically when I've seen a site's traffic rise or fall, it's not because Google got better, but because the site or the competition got better and Google did successfully pick up on whatever signals to figure that out, but I can't say it did so better than in 2014, say.
Then there's this, the keyword stuffing that Buckworks linked to, the "topic stuffing" (hat tip Martinibuster) that I pointed to.
Is this because about 8-10 years ago the low-hanging fruit was picked and the next quantum improvement in search is really, really, really hard? Or is that there has been a huge improvement, but the increments are so small that I don't see them?
Or?
> Or?
Or the quality has gone out of the web. Web pages are now made for ads and the content need only rank good enough in Google, never mind actually answering the topic for humans. Garbage in, garbage out. Even the mainstream media uses click bait titles and mostly never addresses hard news as they dribble off with out any conclusion after three paragraphs of regurgitating each others statistics.
All those labor of love websites are long dead or dying. Everything is now a brochure selling either snake oil or pumping up someone's ego. And that's without the loonies and crackpots.
How do you rank oats that have already been through the horse?
>quality
>google
Definitely a bit a both. Seen a recent example for 'population nairn' which had a people may also ask "what is the fastest town in scotland". The answer G gave was walkwithdinosaurs.
The apparent answer is Nairn. It's a joke. What's the fastest town in Scotland. Naiiiirrn (engine revs). Took me 24 hours to figure our that one. G had decided that enough people posed it as a question for it to be answer. God knows what that has to do with the population of the place.
A similar thread I'd seen was mocking G results for "best bicycles under $500" where 80% of the results had amazon aff links and were review sites. I mean, what is to rank?
This .dk stuff looks like enterprise level spam, that and what with gpt-3. Interesting times for who's to tell what's relevant.