One of my buddies that got into SEO a half decade before I did mentioned the copy and paste rankeroo stuff was real popular back in the days of Infoseek, Altavista, Excite, Lycos and similar.

Google looks for the canonical version of a document and then deduplicates before returning the result set.

You can add &filter=0 to the end of the search URL for a particular query to turn off the duplicate content filters.

An old school spam technique for some affiliates in the early days of Google was to buy a high PR link to their affiliate URL so that like site.com/?aff=123 would be the default version of the homepage & the branded searches for the merchant would then owe the affiliate the commissions until the rankings shifted again.

Very easy to post things on Reddit as a marketer, particularly when working with a small group who can respond to each other to season threads. Plus you can pay trusted Reddit account holders to post items for you.

The design is too monochromatic.

Back in the day a friend mentioned you could choose what version of a phrase you wanted to make the canonical for a search autocompletion by embedding a broken image call to a SERP page for the version of a keyword you wanted to be more popular.

Google has tons of ways to identify real users versus fake users. And lots of the fake it until you make it efforts leave statistical outliers that can lead to ignoring or smoothing away much of the benefits, especially if there is no fire following the smoke trail.

Sites that have a poor user experience by design create the ranking signals for their own demotion by such design. Get a lot of traffic from search with not many people liking the destination page and that ranking will quickly go away.

For what it is worth, Google has favored macro-parasites over micro-parasites. The bigger companies have access to the ears of market regulators, etc. The average small publisher or affiliate site has almost nobody care if it disappears.

Part of the most recent Google update was penalizing high authority trusted sites for publishing off topic content from third parties. There is a concept called "goog enough" explaining how the likes of Forbes ranked for just about everything. https://www.blindfiveyearold.com/its-goog-enough

One time I had a client who thought it was "unfair" to pay me just because I knew how algorithms worked. He was quickly fired, but he did not find inheriting his family owned business unfair. He did not find his ranking boost which gave him outsized profits unfair.

There is no way to go back in time to make everything fair from some arbitrary starting point. All you can do is your best to do your best.

Pricing can lead to unequal outcomes, but it at least provides a signal that you are on the right track or not.

A quest for universal fairness can only work by lowering people rather than by promoting them doing what they are best at.

Anyone seeking universal fairness & equal outcomes in all aspects of life should read Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron as many times as required to change that mindset. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html "THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General."

I'm confused what you're responding to. I never thought everything should be fair.

People are not required to live in the biggest & most expensive cities in the world. Doing so is a premium good. Removing the pricing signal just turns everything into a lottery and/or lowest common denominator practices demonstrating the tragedy of the commons. Sorry your neighbor has mental health issues, uses meth and screams as they throw stuff against the wall at night. Hope you got a good night sleep!

When I got started on the web I moved a couple states over to live with a friend who was going to college. We lived in a mobile home & our rentier extractor landlord captured like $110 a month. I was able to spend little time doing work I didn't want to do in order to pay rent & could spend a lot of time learning.

High rents can offer some level of exclusivity and give people an opportunity to express their values, what they value, and how much they value it. There's a reason that most people who are in subsidized public housing end up wanting to move away if they can afford to.

There are a lot of cross currents there.

The old people with a reverse mortgage & the taxpayer subsidizing the associated losses.

People who put much of their excess savings into an appreciating home they planned to sell to fund their retirement as they moved elsewhere to somewhere cheaper, but now have a home which as a step function is worth far less.

People who would be quickly underwater if the property market tanks deciding to jingle mail, leading to blighted streets for those who stayed.

Local property taxes pay for schools, fire departments, police, etc.

As far as the state being a perfect provider to step in ... in the US about half of healthcare spending is fraud. That the bill is passed onto someone else is a big slice of that (along with ignoring antitrust laws, local CON laws, illegal to import pharmaceuticals directly as a consumer, etc).

I used to live near Chicago as a kid & recalled this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes "At first, the housing was integrated and many residents held jobs. This changed in the years after World War II, when the nearby factories that provided the neighborhood's economic base closed and thousands were laid off. At the same time, the cash-strapped city began withdrawing crucial services like police patrols, transit services, and routine building maintenance. ... On July 17, 1970, Chicago police patrolman Anthony N. Rizzato and Sergeant James Severin were shot and killed by gang members while patrolling community housing for an all-volunteer "Walk and Talk" project. As the officers proceeded across the Cabrini–Green baseball field, the assailants opened fire from an apartment window. The purpose of the shooting was to seal a pact between two rival gangs."

Which land will the free or subsidized housing go on? Will the people spending a grand or two a month in property taxes want the elevated crime levels near their own front door?

You make a lot of valid points in the first half there, but unfortunately to transition away from housing being an investment and towards it being an amenity, it necessarily means affecting those who choose to treat it as an investment - and frankly, all investments come with some risk. But with all your talk of "old people", I think it's fair to point out that this need not happen overnight, and there should be ample warning for retirees to divest of their investments to the private sector gamblers, for the most part.

>People who would be quickly underwater if the property market tanks deciding to jingle mail, leading to blighted streets for those who stayed.

I really don't understand this point. If it's a house where they want to live, they would just stay. If they can't afford the mortgage, yes, they can leave and buy any of the other now cheap property on the market, and the financial institution that took on the risk on lending can either sell it back to them or to someone else. If they don't live there, they're literally part of the problem of speculators treating houses as assets rather than housing, in which case they should be selling it to whoever actually wants to live there, yes.

Now as for the second part:

>As far as the state being a perfect provider to step in ... in the US about half of healthcare spending is fraud.

I feel like you choosing the only first world country with primarily privatised healthcare kind of strengthens my point, not sure what you're getting at here.

>Which land will the free or subsidized housing go on?

It shows just how badly treating housing as a capital asset rather than a public utility has corrupted how people discuss housing, that when I suggest that the government would handle any absolutely necessary rental housing, you immediately jump to low income people. And I don't blame you for thinking that, but that's basically the opposite demographic of who rental property should be for.

There's no inherent reason that low-income people should be renting rather than owning - they have no particular need for short-term housing. The only reason those two things are associated is because housing is treated as a capital asset.

Rather, the only people who have reason to rent rather than own are those who have a short term need for housing, which is going to be largely moderate-income people who move around for work, as well as students aiming for a higher-income job.

There are other systems, of course, where no one can claim physical ownership of something like land, and everyone rents - like Singapore's public housing model. Singapore's model, by the way, sidesteps the rest of your concern:

>Which land will the free or subsidized housing go on? Will the people spending a grand or two a month in property taxes want the elevated crime levels near their own front door?

Where will lower income people go? The same places everyone else goes. The only reason you have "bad" neighborhoods is because you've shoved all the economically disadvantaged people into one spot, and allowed the wealthy to cloister themselves into enclaves where the issues with poverty are out of sight and out of mind. As I said, Singapore's public housing distributes income levels much more evenly, and shows major benefits from it.

They could have charged a review fee to have an appraiser visit & make accurate price estimates & then let the homeowner keep the Zillow certified valuation label if they don't sell it to Zillow.