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.
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
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.