> Google's algorithm works for its intended purposes, which is to serve pages that will benefit the highest amount of people searching for a specific term.
Does it? So for any product search, thrown-together comparison sites without actual substance but lots of affiliate links are really among the best results? Or maybe they are the most profitable result, and thus the one most able to invest in optimizing for ranking? Similarly, do we really expect results on (to a human) clearly hacked domains to be the best for anything, but Google will still put them in the top 20 for some queries? "Normal people want this crap" is a questionable starting point in many cases.
Over the long-term, Google's algorithm will connect the average person to the page most likely to benefit them, more than it won't.
There is no "best result."
Any page falling under "thrown-together comparison sites without actual substance but lots of affiliate links" are temporal inefficiencies that get removed after each major update.
Will more pop up? Yes, and they will take advantage of any ineffeciency or edge-cases in the algorithim to boost their rankings to #1.
Will they stay there for more than a few months? No. They will be squashed out, and legitimate players will over time win out.
This is the dichotomy between "churn and burn" businesses and "long term" businesses. You will make a very lucrative, and quick, buck going full blackhat, but your business won't last and you will be consistently need to adapt to each successive algo update. While long-standing "legit" businesses will only need to maintain market dominance -- something much easier to do than break into the market from ground zero, which churn and burners will have to do in perpetuity until they burn out themselves.
If you want to test this, go and find 10 websites you think are shady, but have top 5 rankings for a certain search phrase. Mark down the sites, keyword, and exact pages linked. Now, wait a few months. Search again using that exact phrase. More likely than not, i.e more than 5 out of 10, will no longer be in the top 5 for their respective phrases, and a couple domains will have been shuttered. I should note that "not deep info" is not "shady," because the results are for the average person. Ex. WebMD is not deep, but it's not shady either.
I implore people to try and get a site ranked with blackhat tricks and lots of starting capital, and see just how hard it is to keep ranked consistantly using said tricks. It's easy to speculate and make logical statements, but they don't hold much weight without first-hand experience and observation.
>Will they stay there for more than a few months? No. They will be squashed out, and legitimate players will over time win out.
This isn't true at all in my experience. As a quick test I tried searching for "best cordless iron", on the first page there is an article from 2018 that leads to a very broken page with filler content and affiliate links. [1] There are a couple of other articles with basically the exact same content rewritten in various ways also on the first page.
A quick SERP history check confirms that this page has returned in the top 10 results for various keywords since late 2018.
>It's easy to speculate and make logical statements, but they don't hold much weight without first-hand experience and observation.
This statement is a bit ironic given that it took me 1 keyword and 5 seconds of digging to find this one example.
Does it? So for any product search, thrown-together comparison sites without actual substance but lots of affiliate links are really among the best results? Or maybe they are the most profitable result, and thus the one most able to invest in optimizing for ranking? Similarly, do we really expect results on (to a human) clearly hacked domains to be the best for anything, but Google will still put them in the top 20 for some queries? "Normal people want this crap" is a questionable starting point in many cases.