My guess is cohost ranks so high in search engines for the same reasons why tumblr spambots exist. The more unique links to an article the more trusted it is by search engines and it gets ranked higher. Every cohost post is an article being linked to again and again every time it’s shared. And there’s no filtering of it because it’s not big enough to be treated as social media.
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- shelraphen.com/
Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.
I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.
I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock
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in reply to @shel's post:
fwiw, three things:
- pagerank was insanely gameable and a whole generation of SEO spam was built around gaming it about 15 years ago, so I think google's search engine division has figured out ways of mitigating its influence;
- I think links on the same domain barely counted in the first place, because you controlled both ends and it was obvious how that could be misused;
- whenever you link to something on cohost, we set
rel=nofollow, telling google not to count that link for the purposes of pagerank, in an effort to reduce the incentive to create link spam pages
i do wonder if the signal to noise ratio here being better than the AI output and psy-op/disinfo sludge world out there is factored in at some point, in a similar vein to Reddit and Wikipedia