this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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Privacy

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[–] hopefull_cottonball@lemmy.ml 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

what is "artificially increasing the ranking of other sites"?

[–] Tenkard@lemmy.ml 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Search engines such as Google need to rank results in some way, to decide which ones to display on top.

This algorithm changes depending on new developments, both cultural and technical, see Google recently putting results from reddit firsts.

One typical way to do this is checking "how many other websites are pointing at this result", and since traffic is money, people try to game the algorithm by creating fake websites which links to the one they want to push.

[–] hopefull_cottonball@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 6 months ago

In particular, it refers to PageRank, the algorithm that set Google apart from its predecessors and upon which it was originally built.