I'm not saying Google is doing this but what if....

SEOfarmer · Dec 6, 2020

splishsplash said:
Really? Tell that to the 100's of clients who I've helped rank, and the countless people who have read my guides, applied it to their sites and made $$.

Every single person who sells, takes part in or tries to learn SEO has their fingers in the air making their best guesses.

You do not know the algorithm, you do not know what it wants or how it works. Even if you did this algorithm is different based on product search, informational search, questions and whatever else.

And then we add in the fact that everyday this algorithm gets updated and tweaked by people who also don't understand it because it's all done with machine learning.

There is not a person on earth who truly understands how Google works at algorithm level but if you want to stand there and tell us how you're the next guru talking like you're enlightened you do that mate.

You put out some good content but every "fact" in SEO is an opinion. It's an industry we have done very well from but let's not pretend that we know what we are talking about. We are guessing just like everyone else.

It's also interesting you talk about clients and not your own projects

KaleidoJack · Dec 6, 2020

SEOfarmer said:
We are guessing just like everyone else.

But can't some guesses be more educated than others?

Great posts in this thread. Got to give splishsplash some credit. Not only is he clearly a specialist, he's got his values in place. Thanks for writing all that stuff out, dude!

vriskas · Dec 7, 2020

splishsplash said:
So your response to my detailed post explaining how companies work and how the engineering processes work was just skipped, and instead you've replied with

"LOL It's a Google patent".

This is a giant, giant straw-man argument.

It's not a "google patent". There is no "randomness" in the algorithm.

The patent you are referring to is about how the algorithm responds to new links.

It adds in an element of randomness for a period of around 5 days to 10 weeks based on how natural it deems the link building.

This is to prevent people from reverse engineering what links do and don't work. Without this you could build a link, and X days later you'd have an exact rank response.

The randomness for up to 10 weeks makes it hard to pin-point which links did what.

Related to this, they also have part of the algorithm that will drop your rank if it detects overly unnatural link building, and if you remove those links you'll then have a permanent drop.

This has absolutely nothing to do with "randomness" in the algorithm. It's a short, random response to new links in order to confuse link builders. Nothing more. Think of it as I want to move from point A to point B. Instead of going in a straight line I can move to E, then to X, then to C, then to F, then to B. The end result is still the same, but the path there has elements of randomness.

Understand? Or are you just going to give me another "LOL everyone.. peeps are so clueless they dont know whats what"

Incredible that within 2 sentences you can say there is no randomness and then admit there is randomness in the algorithm.

Testing a site's ranking necessitates randomness in the algorithm. You're conflating the conspiracy that Google engineers are out to get small website owners with the absolute fact that every ranking algorithm must randomly choose a spot for a new page to rank before it can begin benchmarking it against other results.

SEOfarmer · Dec 7, 2020

vriskas said:
Incredible that within 2 sentences you can say there is no randomness and then admit there is randomness in the algorithm.

What do you expect from a guy who sells links instead of makes money from SEO.

KaleidoJack · Dec 8, 2020

From what I could tell, he was using the same word (i.e. randomness) to refer to two different concepts. Real-life randomness happens because real life has no rules. Programmed randomness is strictly speaking impossible, because there would be rules dictating the "randomness", i.e. there would be no randomness. That's where the confusion in this thread arises.

So his main idea is that the AI-powered algorithm is not going out of its way to create random ranking criteria. Generating randomness in computers is one of the toughest problems of computer science, after all:

https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-a-computer-generate-a-truly-random-number/

vriskas · Dec 8, 2020

KaleidoJack said:
From what I could tell, he was using the same word (i.e. randomness) to refer to two different concepts. Real-life randomness happens because real life has no rules. Programmed randomness is strictly speaking impossible, because there would be rules dictating the "randomness", i.e. there would be no randomness. That's where the confusion in this thread arises.

So his main idea is that the AI-powered algorithm is not going out of its way to create random ranking criteria. Generating randomness in computers is one of the toughest problems of computer science, after all:

https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-a-computer-generate-a-truly-random-number/

An interesting study:

https://dejanmarketing.com/the-random-google/

Bob M · Dec 8, 2020

u cant fight with google. we just follow the rules...

KaleidoJack · Dec 8, 2020

btw, philosophically speaking, "random ranking" is a contradictio in adjecto. If there's ranking, there's criteria. But criteria are a bunch of rules! Therefore, the ranking can't be random.

So I can see how the pursuit of ranking the relevancy of data can clash with the pursuit of randomizing data. Both goals are diametrically opposed.

KaleidoJack · Dec 8, 2020

From our perspective, the ranking may seem "stupid" or "random", but that's because we don't know the criteria, or at the very least the rules that are used. Moreover, if what splishsplash is saying about the current AI implementation methods is true, even the engineers who built the algorithm don't know the specific rules. They just update the engine, test it out in the real world, and see how it goes. The "real world" being the brains of the users that search for the data. If these brains like to browse what they clicked on google dot com, then whatever content was in the link they clicked must've been "relevant". Etc. This would make sense from an engineering point of view. The artificial intelligence would be learning what is "relevant" from the responses of the users and would then rank data (or websites) accordingly. I'd say the most obvious way to measure how much a person likes the content is the time they spend browsing it and how much they interact with it. Then, the closer your website looks to the proven best ones, the higher it ranks.

That some low-level barriers would be erected to prevent the most obvious attempts to abuse the ranking system seems reasonable. But to actively randomize the order of a ranked list? That seems... illogical to say the least.

I'm not saying Google is doing this but what if....

SEOfarmer

BANNED

KaleidoJack

Junior Member

vriskas

Junior Member

SEOfarmer

BANNED

KaleidoJack

Junior Member

vriskas

Junior Member

Bob M

BANNED

KaleidoJack

Junior Member

KaleidoJack

Junior Member

Main Menu

Marketplace

Making Money

BlackHat World