My view of it is that they basically lost the SEO spam wars. Without the ML pipelines, the top results would all be dominated by the smaller, highly skilled, SEO manipulators. They didn't find a way to cleanly excise that spam, so they resorted to a very imperfect hammer...giving a lot of SEO weight to large corporate entities. So basically, a different kind of spam dominates now.
Minor rant: I can't seem to contact an actual towing company directly, it's usually some external entity that ranks top in Google then they charge you more to find the actual local towing company. It says "Towing company in city name" but it's not local.
This was my experience last year when I wanted to find a locksmith. EVERY result on GMaps that was shown as being in my city was, in fact, some centralized company that seemed to contract out to guys working out of their cars. Every one took my name and said they'd get back to me (which they did).
This is certainly a problem with the locksmith companies, but I think there's also a Maps problem, too: Google enables this kind of commerce, especially businesses that apparently have a physical location but explicitly stated on the phone that I can't stop by there. It reminded me of all of the thousands of Delaware corps housed in a single building.
If Google made it so that you're only listed on the map if you actually have a physical commerce location, that would help a lot -- at least for those kinds of businesses that need it. Towing companies and the like may be an exception?
The type of people get into locksmithing are like those who do computer security for fun - they like to figure out how things work and how they can be broken. Which means that every locksmith wants to figure out how to game the system. And the first thing that they all figured out is that people tend to select whatever locksmith is closest. So they all went and pretended to be in a million places around the neighborhood in hopes that THEY would get selected.
That was the case a decade ago. And it was a nightmare. Glancing at a locksmith search now, Google somehow cleaned that up a lot. But it doesn't surprise me that whoever is on top now is someone who figured out how to game the current system.
> This was my experience last year when I wanted to find a locksmith. EVERY result on GMaps that was shown as being in my city was, in fact, some centralized company that seemed to contract out to guys working out of their cars. Every one took my name and said they'd get back to me (which they did).
I had the same thing happen just last week! The locksmith who came for me gave me his personal phone number though and said if I needed help again, I could call him directly and he could give a better rate due to not needing to pay the centralized company a portion. Despite often having social anxiety with strangers, I've still found that just being friendly and treating people well (in this case still giving a tip alongside the cancellation fee after my super finally arrived just moments before the locksmith) ends up getting me better services than any research I've been able to do online. I ended up making a similar connection with the people we hired to install our curtain rods just after we moved in; I was talking to them about how the movers that brought my girlfriends things over to the apartment ended up damaging her desk in transit, and they said that they also do moving as well as installation/assembly, so next time we end up moving, we also will be able to hire people we know and trust (we ended up hiring them again for a few odd jobs since the first time, and we almost always end up getting one of the same three people we've met and made connections with).
Not sure what the problem is here? You require that a locksmith sits in a brick and mortar store waiting for phone calls? Their tools fit in a backpack, there's literally no need for a physical location. I guess unless you're getting keys copied but any hardware store can do that.
If it's a Google Maps hit, street view and look for an actual storefront? Many mom-and-pop locksmiths have stores with safes etc on display. Though that won't work so well with tow companies.
It's really annoying - you have to dig around, and many business do not have a web presence at all so unless you can find something local with ads, you find nothing.
Some tricks I've used in the past include local church bulletins (most parishes have some sort of a website and a weekly bulletin with advertising on the back), or local sport team sponsors, or local bars.
For towing, you can also try calling a local dealership or auto repair.
Or their only web presence at all is a facebook page. I don't have a facebook account so this used to be mildly annoying but lately I've noticed it won't let me see at the page at all. I click the link to visit the business's "website" and I'm greeted with a full-page prompt to sign in to facebook.
Yeah, their "local search" stuff seems to use yet a different set of criteria. You'll see similar complaints for other niches like locksmiths. Some set of SEO spammers has figured out how to use services like UPS-Store virtual addresses to fool Google.
There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam.
"But wait!", you say, "there are some legit reviewers out there." Yes, there sure are, by my starement is accurate, because for every legit review site with aws referrals, there are tens of thousands of ml created spam referral sites.
And so the real review sites are often lost in the mix regardless, which makss arguments to keep those results pointless.
But google leaves them there, and this is the same sort of site which, if it were an email, would immediately end up in a spam folder.
And beyond this, the other part of the problem is their ridiculous aliasing of search terms, which helps spammy sites come back as a response.
You say google lost? It's not losing, if you just don't care.
Frankly, it's just a return on investment thing. As long as only a few people per tens of thousands bolt, why spend the r&d?
> There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam.
This is the root of the problem. If Google targets the low-hanging fruit, the spammers will very quickly find a workaround. Google is trying - and failing - to use more sophisticated signals.
Spam is a virus. Google beneffited from the network effect, eradicating all opposition. But, like a European medieval monarch, it now has a poor immune system because of its lack of genetic diversity. The many, many SEO spammers are constantly experimenting, and they only have to find one flaw in Google's algorithm for it to win and spread quickly.
Google's monoculture cannot save us, however hard they try.
I put Amazon referral links on my technical blog whenever it's a hardware project. So far I have made < $5 on it so I should probably remove them. But for others I think it helps justify the time I spent writing up the blog and doing the project.
If there is a numbered list with referral links. 99% it's low effort referral spam trash. How they don't already filter this must be some sort active sabatague
Such links are relatively easy to hide from Google (obfuscate behind a redirect or inject with JS on user action), so if Google started using the links as a signal, spammers would hide the links, and invert the signal — only non-spammers who don't want to risk being delisted for cloaking would be left with the links, and penalized for them.
Blog farms are way too popular now, too. People have figured out how Google recognizes "meaningful content", and they generate blog posts and pages with AI and ghost writers to pump out vaguely helpful articles.
They downranked pirated content results in 2018[1] so someone could just use pagerank and include those sites and have a better search engine for that sort of content. There's also the "controversial twiddler"[2] which makes Google only present mainstream opinions on various topics. I had to search yandex.com to even find a good article on it. There's some weird stuff on the Youtube blacklist, like the Las Vegas mass shooting from a few years ago that everyone forgot about that they never figured out the motive for. See the leaked "YouTube Blacklist" under the "Censorship" link in the project veritas article.[2]
What I was talking about is that there was once a pretty large community of smaller SEO manipulators that did a lot of experimentation on what really worked. Especially in the "black hat" realm. Finding things like areas on big-brand sites that would accept user-generated content, comments, etc, where you could bypass some checks and insert links to sites.
They would experiment in a pretty deep way, varying things like the rate of new links, type of new links, variations of anchor text / bare links, and so on.
It USED to be very effective.
The larger entities don't really have to be that detailed. If you have that brand power, you can just cut partnership/cross-link deals and pay a little attention to things like anchor text in links, contextual text around the link, etc.
Edit: Ah, yeah, agreed. What got lost in all this was good content that had no big brand behind it. The indiscriminate hammer Google used to kill off small-guy SEO spam also pushed a lot of actually good stuff, stuff that never did any SEO at all, off the first page.
For sure. Way back any high Pagerank page linking to another would unequivocally boost the target site, whatever niche, but it's became more nuanced as you say.
What I was meaning was, the players who can manipulate the link graph most cost effectively tend to rank better and it favours those with deeper pockets. Not so bad for competitive niches and high volume terms, but muddies the waters for many other things.
