Originally published at: Forbes' dirty little secret: Exploiting Google for massive profits - Boing Boing
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The zombie magazine brand has been a content and SEO mill for years, riding on the domain’s vestigial cachet as a business news outlet. For a while it was also being used as a pay-for-play vanity press so various cranks and bad actors could claim they were published in Forbes. Whichever parasites are running it now have just gradually upped their SEO game.
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I’m honestly more curious about what the incentives look like on the google side of things.
SEO scum are going to grow like biofilms in any crevice they can, such is the nature of their degenerate kind; but it requires either dramatic incompetence, apathy, or at least tacit approval for them to make it out of the chum boxes and 10th page results; especially across so many categories and under a single recognizable name rather than some sort of covert network of ostensibly independent operations trying to avoid being correlated by someone who has all the logs.
So what’s the deal? Has Google just gradually been hollowing out everything that isn’t Adsense or AI bros? Have they concluded that delivering Forbes slurry doesn’t actually drive users away and delivers ad impressions just the same?
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Yes.
Google stopped being a ‘real’ company at least a decade ago and became a spreadsheet AI where decisions are not taken for any reason other than “number go up”. Even the ‘web-only’ version of the search engine doesn’t work any more - it is incapable of finding stuff sensibly.
So this pseudo-Forbes seems like a fairly obvious development for anyone who recognised that this was happening but also realised that a solid brand name was going to be necessary to overcome doubtful users.
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Forbes is blocked at my router for the last 5+ years, whatever they said was garbage.
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Google knows exactly what it is doing. This article goes into it (linking to Hacker News as clicking through them might bypass the article paywall).
Speaking on the enshitification of Google search, did anyone else notice they restored the Discussions search functionality? Ten years ago they removed it (tbm=dsc), but it is now back as the Forums tab. I first noticed it would show up on some search terms back in February when I was visiting the US. But there was no way of forcing it through a URL and it never appeared again when I returned home. But it appears they have rolled it out globally and there is now a URL parameter, udm=18, to force it.
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I briefly subscribed, back when it had a bit more cred. I was put off by their “lifestyle” section that detailed ways the nouveau riche could conspicuously consume. Bloomberg has that, too, but they’re a much better news provider than Forbes.
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The FT has its “How to Spend it Supplement”….
Only problem Google has with any of this shit is that some of the money isn’t going to them. They hate that.
Everything else they are fine with because they are the parasitic vermin eating the host. Plus they are shit human beings.
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As a wise man said, “Fuck those people, man!”
uBlacklist – Get this Extension for 
Firefox (en-US)
This extension prevents the sites you specify from appearing in Google search results.
You can add rules on search result pages, or on sites to be blocked by clicking the toolbar icon. Rules can be specified either by match patterns (e.g. ://.example.com/*) or by regular expressions (e.g. /example.(net|org)/). …
ETA:
Here’s what I see when I run Gogol searches -
When block this site is clicked -
When details is clicked -
There’s no reason to put up with that seo [s.ucky e.vil o.rganisms] bullshit and keyword spam sites.
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Aye, the Forbes name used to stand for something!
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they’ve fallen far from the kashmir hill days, they used to put out some decent journalism, but everyone i read from that period has moved on
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I’m finding it really hard to comprehend your example of how to block my favourite Ride album. Please redo with Carnival of Light.
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Forbes also took down serial fabulist Stephen Glass in the late '90s when they were still a real magazine with an early on-line presence. Those days are long gone.
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I’d just been looking it up earlier that day, and no offense was meant.
I love Ride, and my head almost exploded when they opened the show I saw with Leave Them All Behind!
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