Nobody becomes #1 by accident.
As we all have both our own similar and unique experiences with regards to working with search engines and / or any other tech company, I feel like it's a bit of a disservice to lump peoples' interpretations and critical thinking into such an all-inclusive term as "conspiracy theory", and to then discard it as nonfactor.
I personally would not discount the potentiality of a degree of "randomness" being a vital part of Google's spectrum. Consider this, from Google, for example::
""
By releasing changes
every day, they are undoubtedly doing a lot of testing (aka, "Trial and Error"). It's virtually inevitable.
How do I know?
Because they also say this:
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By their own admission, at least some of it is random, as they don't always know what will work best and what will not. There's a certain element of randomness to that.
It's much like writing code. You may not always know what the output will be, so you pop in a value, see what happens, and tweak until satisfied, or you may have to get rid of it altogether and try a different approach.
I would agree with you on this. Not because I don't believe they test random things to see what works. I do believe they do. I agree with you on the basis that I believe there's a difference between random and nonsensical. An update just to confuse people wouldn't make sense for them to do, in my opinion, as their public agenda is not to confuse people, but rather, to serve quality search results to people using their search engine. Being random just for the sake of confusion, would not accomplish such a goal. With that being said, would I believe that it could be a push to get people into using Google Ads? Perhaps. But I think this would depend more on the type of content, than just having a "throw-shit-on-the-wall-to-see-if-any-of-it-sticks" approach. For example, informational article content wouldn't need to be pushed to Google Ads, as it wouldn't make sense to force
Newbie Blogger #1 and
Informational Blogger #2 to do this. Now on the other hand, if you're an eCommerce store selling
best shaving razors for men, then sure, I could see them wanting to urge you to use Google Ads.
Here's a helpful hint for Newbie Blogger #1 and Informational Blogger #2:
I recently ran a test on an informational article on my website, where there was a keyword that gets around 20,000 monthly searches. There's nothing to sell inside of my content for this particular page. No affiliate programs or anything. It's strictly information-based. As a test, I setup a $10 / day budget with Google Ads and sent a pretty nice amount of traffic to it. Within 3 days, my organic keyword rank went from position 80-something to 12. This is just some food for thought. Anyway, I digress.
There's nothing wrong with randomness, as it may be that one seemingly random tweak that helps them to achieve their goal(s). I've spent over a decade as an engineer and working alongside other engineers. Sometimes we have a spark of creativity and we know what goals we're trying to accomplish, and sometimes we need to get creative with our approaches, so we say things like, "hey, let's try this and see what happens", and then we explain to our managers what we did and why we did it, and if it sounds good to them, they say things like, "okay, let's take a backup first, and we'll try it. If it works, great! If not, we'll roll it back." Boom! Update.
Also related to what I said above, is the fact that different tiers of management have different agendas and goals than lower tiers of management as well as the other employees below them. Many of the engineers focus less on agenda and focus more on goals -- ie: meeting goals set forth by the ones who do have agendas. Again, nobody becomes #1 by accident.
If these mega corporations didn't have agendas, they'd be much more responsive, specific, and understandable at these congressional court hearings, for example. Instead, they beat around every bush that gets thrown at them. If these mega corporations didn't have agendas, then privacy policies wouldn't be the lengths of novels.
I cannot subscribe to this belief, as I have (and I'm sure many others have, as well) removed problematic links, in a sense, by way of both manually removing bad backlinks and by using Google's Disavow Tool. I personally have done this and have removed everything from spam links to SAPE links and everything in between. To the best of my knowledge, there were never any permanent drops experienced, as a result of removing such links. In fact, my results were often that I'd generally be restored back to normal [or even better than before] within a day or two (though sometimes a bit longer).
White-Hat isn't necessarily not building links, just as Black-Hat isn't limited to building links. Some internal stuff can be very much Black-Hat. Some external stuff can be very much White-Hat.
This is something I 100% agree with. BUT, I wouldn't go as far as calling
@splishsplash a liar. He's very knowledgeable about a lot of things revolving around SEO, and his experiences are different than my experiences which differ from your experiences, and so on. He knows what he knows about what he knows, as do you, and as do I. Here's the thing, as is stated directly from Google:
""
So all that is to say that none of us know everything about Google and how they work. None of us. Does that mean we're all a bunch of liars? No. Not necessarily. Again, we can know what we know, but we don't know what we don't. So please, let's refrain from the insults and name-calling. It does none of us any good. We're all in this same boat, just trying to figure things out. There's no need for that other stuff. It's okay to disagree on things.
Anyway, there's more I want to say in this post, but I'll probably have another post a bit later. I need to go let the dogs out for a bit.
Sorry for being all over the place, but I've been reading this thread at different times throughout the day and just wanted to get some of my thoughts out before I forget them (old people problems lol).
