I've noticed when I search on Google, the results are often dominated by search pages from sites like job boards, e-commerce shops, and some NSFW sites instead of the actual content I'm looking for. One of the worst offenders is Jooble—I can never find anything useful there! LinkedIn can show up too, but at least they often have some actual content.
This brings up a few questions:
1. Is there a specific term for this situation of search results leading to other search results? Has it been discussed or named anywhere?
2. Why doesn't Google seem to take action on this? It feels like they could easily penalize sites exploiting this tactic. I've seen policies that suggest they don't approve of it, so why is nothing being done? Has that policy been lifted, or is it just not enforced?
3. As a user, is there anything I can do about it? I've tried excluding specific URL paths in my searches, like using `-inurl:/search/`, but some sites have tricky patterns that make it hard to separate search results from actual content.
3 Answers
I feel you! My posts get buried sometimes because of weird filters, even after being approved by the mods. It's so annoying when you know the content deserves better visibility.
You might want to check your robots.txt and possibly use the `rel='canonical'` tag to help merge similar pages into one search result. That could help a bit with getting better outputs in certain cases.
It's a classic cat-and-mouse game! It all started with meta tags and then moved to backlinks. Unfortunately, there's no foolproof solution. Now, the focus is on content being king, but that often leads to AI-generated junk flooding the results. It seems like this has been going on forever and Google struggles to keep up.
It’s frustrating, right? Google doesn’t really provide a way for users to report bad results. It feels like they're missing the mark entirely when it comes to cleaning up search results.