How does Google deal with ranking in this case?

john_doe_ · Apr 11, 2025

Hi there,

I just find another interest case: search "minimax" in Google, from US.
An impersonate website "minmax" is at much higher ranking than the official website minimax.io or some other official sites covers "minimax" term.

Looking into backlinks in SEMRush and social media signals, the real site (minimax.io) has patently much stronger signals, such as more backlinks, social mentions.

I can see the impersonate site minmax.ai may use the way: purchase a domain name, replace & refresh the content to "AI art generator, video, image" which the site were about AI search)
One thing more interesting is: if search "minmax", a site minmax.io is outranking minmax.ai
Then the whole picture looks like Google considers:

minmax.ai is strongly related to term "minimax";
minmax.io is strongly related to term "minmax";
minimax.io is not related to term "minimax";

(If mimax.ai is really good, then it shall be correlated to both minimax and minmax, but it's not, so I consider it is using some black / grey hat way to mislead Google to correlated to "minimax")

Question:
What techniques this site (minmax.ai) may use so that mislead Google outranks it other than official site minimax.io when search term is exactly minimax (not minmax)? Private-network?

I tried to find other clues but didn't find.

Any ideas?

One last thing I wanted to talk is the "Organic Traffic", I've found this interest situation in many of recent AI sites those get higher rank in a very QUICK time:
from SEMRush, when compare a new AI site (those recently rapidly get higher rank), they usually have a lot of org. traffic, then how does this happen? what techniques they may use?

tazarbm · Apr 16, 2025

4 things I can think of, you should look into these more closely and you might find the answer there....

1. MinMax,ai probably buys Google Ads so it gets preferential treatment from Google

2. MinMax.ai probably has higher authority (DR) than minimax.io, so they probably get preferential treatment this way (you should also check the backlinks of both sites, not just their DR.... and when I say check the backlinks I mean try to find the hidden backlinks as I have a suspicion that MinMax.ai has hidden strong backlinks that makes it outrank the original site)

3. MinMax.ai probably targets (some of) the keywords that minimax.io targets, but better, so google rewards it because of better quality content

4. the word "mimimax" is very broad, so google is trying to guess whether the users are really searching for minimax, or they are searching for minmax. And since google tracks, logs and interprets the history, search patterns, psychological profile, etc. of each one of their users, they have probably detected / figured that most people are either searching for MinMax instead of minimax, or they are interested mostly in AI art generation instead of what the other word (minimax) represents, so they give weight to the MinMax.ai site because this one is more popular.

Google oftentimes (actually, always) has such weird rules and exceptions that we don't know about, so it's very possible that they look at the multiple signals that they analyze about everything and - based on the sum / average / whatever other formula they use - choose to rank MinMax.ai higher based on their assessments, accurate or not...

BeatboxRank · Apr 16, 2025

I think this is the case with the domain extensions.
We talk about .io vs ai, and today I think .ai has better chances to rank because of hype and future, and maybe we should consider starting to register this kind of domain (.ai). If you ask me personally if someone targets with .com or at least .org or .net or as a last resort .info, they will outrank .io.
If we talk about SEO rankings, I believe .io is not a good domain extension.

David Boost · Apr 16, 2025

Google Ads is working there. If any pays money to Google through Google Ads, then Google takes care of that site without focusing on anything. Money talks!

john_doe_ · Apr 20, 2025

BeatboxRank said:
I think this is the case with the domain extensions.
We talk about .io vs ai, and today I think .ai has better chances to rank because of hype and future, and maybe we should consider starting to register this kind of domain (.ai). If you ask me personally if someone targets with .com or at least .org or .net or as a last resort .info, they will outrank .io.
If we talk about SEO rankings, I believe .io is not a good domain extension.

no offence, but just a different case: if make search "homework helper", "youtube summarizer", etc, there is a domain "notegpt.io" is the .io domain but at very high ranking.
If looked into the site a little, apparently it's just an AI site build merely for SEO but probably with advance SEO meothods.
See my other post here: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-these-ai-site-get-top-rank-discuss.1684539/

Seems highly like the minmax.io and notegpt.io are using very close "black" or "grey" SEO which hard to find clue by using common SEO tools.

Just wondering the possible ways.

john_doe_ · Apr 20, 2025

tazarbm said:
4 things I can think of, you should look into these more closely and you might find the answer there....

1. MinMax,ai probably buys Google Ads so it gets preferential treatment from Google

2. MinMax.ai probably has higher authority (DR) than minimax.io, so they probably get preferential treatment this way (you should also check the backlinks of both sites, not just their DR.... and when I say check the backlinks I mean try to find the hidden backlinks as I have a suspicion that MinMax.ai has hidden strong backlinks that makes it outrank the original site)

3. MinMax.ai probably targets (some of) the keywords that minimax.io targets, but better, so google rewards it because of better quality content

4. the word "mimimax" is very broad, so google is trying to guess whether the users are really searching for minimax, or they are searching for minmax. And since google tracks, logs and interprets the history, search patterns, psychological profile, etc. of each one of their users, they have probably detected / figured that most people are either searching for MinMax instead of minimax, or they are interested mostly in AI art generation instead of what the other word (minimax) represents, so they give weight to the MinMax.ai site because this one is more popular.

Google oftentimes (actually, always) has such weird rules and exceptions that we don't know about, so it's very possible that they look at the multiple signals that they analyze about everything and - based on the sum / average / whatever other formula they use - choose to rank MinMax.ai higher based on their assessments, accurate or not...

thanks for replies.
on the other hand, probably the minmax.ai is using other ways, black or gery.
completely agree your statement of "google has such weird rules", but the minmax has persons know about it maybe.
But Google's rule may not "weird" but just "hidden", let me give this as real example as well:
when search "minimax", Hailuo.ai is in higher rank as well, coz by using algorithm, Google strongly correlate "Minimax" with "AI video generator", and "Hailuo AI" is the product of Minimax. <<<< in another word, at the time Google correlated Hailuo AI with Minimax by the algorithm, it meets a lot of user's expectation and search intention and real-market, but just "minmax ai" use a way cheating (or just letting) Google and misleading minmax.ai is strongly correlated with minimax. (and this is what I am wondering HOW, coz from SEMRush, there is no clue can be found: no strong backlinks, no other signals, etc.).

GGadvert · Apr 20, 2025

One thing that I found out is that .io domain takes way longer to load the page than the .ai domain so it may help as well.

How does Google deal with ranking in this case?

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