This is clearly not the case. Google heavily prioritizes users actually finding what they are looking for.

Google works the same way. It gives you results based on what you search for, but who gets to sit at the top and how did that site get to the top? Because it followed Google’s guidelines which can be offset by a single editorial backlink?

That’s the angle I am talking about. There are millions of niches where big money can be made, and in those specific niches you don’t rise to the top simply because you are the best. Google has no idea what is or isn’t the best and for them it’s just as much of a guessing game.

I suppose I am talking specifically about selling links. How would you feel if you found out that one of the journalists whose content you admire is also participating in these schemes? And mind you, editorial links are like the top of the food chain.

Underneath that you got millions of other sites that will sell links starting anywhere from $10 to $1,000 bucks depending on their own “authority”.

That’s what I would like to see investigated and exposed, because it can be done. As someone who operates a mildly successful blog, I get around 300 emails a month asking me to peddle all kinds of products and whatnot.

I can apply the same argument as you. "If the almighty invisible hand was allowed to compete in the search space competitors would pop up with their own indexers".

The problem is while Forbes can have high quality articles, it also has a wide array of VERY low quality ones.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/an-incomplete-history-of-f...

So the issue becomes it's less the domain I trust/don't trust, but rather a more complicate heuristic.