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Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
(tech.slashdot.org)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The SEO community is not disorganized, they have conferences, write books, communicate with each other and work together. It's a very organized community.
What's changed is a few years ago Google stopped engaging with that community and changed from a "how can we actually work together" to an adversarial relationship.
This article is actually a great read on the topic:
https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results
Now that there's no dialogue, the spammers don't need to care about anything but increasing reach while not getting banned.
Just to add to that, on my main job as a web developer, we had contracted to an SEO company some years ago, and they were constantly in communication with Google. One of our web sites had done something Google doesn't like in the past, and Google flagged that and it was killing its position in the search rankings. Google themselves won't tell you much more than that, but the SEO group was able to figure out what it was and get Google to give us a clean pass.
Used to be that way. Just from personal observation, I concur with the poster above that this relationship has broken down and it's worse for everyone.