SEO: when helping Google turns into gaming Google

SEO has a strange reputation.

On the one hand, every website owner wants to rank well on Google. That makes perfect sense. If you run a business, make a good product or provide a useful service, you want people to be able to find you.

On the other hand, spend a little time in the industry and you will see activities that look less and less like improving a website and more like training an algorithm to do what you want.

That raises an interesting question:

is SEO simply helping a search engine understand a website, or trying to convince it that our business is better, more important and more popular than it really is?

The answer is: it depends.

There is a substantial difference between writing a useful article based on your own experience and buying a publication whose only real purpose is to create the impression that “the internet is talking about us”.

One describes reality.

The other starts manufacturing it for an algorithm.

Let us start with the good part of SEO

SEO is not inherently suspicious.

In its SEO Starter Guide , Google describes SEO as work that helps search engines understand a website's content and helps users find it and decide whether it is worth visiting.

That includes perfectly ordinary things:

a logical website structure,
readable URLs,
useful titles and descriptions,
content that answers real user questions,
appropriate links,
making pages discoverable and indexable,
speed, security, accessibility and proper functionality on mobile devices.

Google itself stresses that there is no “secret” that automatically guarantees the top position.

It is hard to argue with that part of SEO.

If I have a website about gearbox repairs, I should clearly explain that I repair gearboxes, where I do it, which cars I work on, what the service involves and how to contact me.

That is not manipulating Google.

It is simply building a website properly.

The problem starts when the website itself is no longer enough

At some point, the client wants results.

Competitors are doing SEO too. Nobody can buy the top organic position from Google, and the precise order of results depends on many systems and signals that keep changing.

So first we improve the content, structure, indexing, performance and technical errors.

Then a question comes up:

“What if we get more links?”

This is where the story becomes more interesting.

A link is not a magic vote, but it still matters

Google explicitly reminds us that PageRank uses links and is one of many signals used by its search engine. Today's rankings also depend on far more systems than links alone.

A natural link follows a simple logic.

Someone found your material, considered it useful and referred to it on their own site.

The problem begins when a link exists primarily because someone paid for it to influence rankings.

Google is quite specific about these practices. Its spam policies list examples of link spam including buying or selling links for ranking purposes, paying for posts containing those links, excessive link exchanges, automated link creation and sponsored content that passes ranking signals.

There is an important distinction here:

a paid publication is not a problem in itself.

Advertising, a sponsored article or a partnership with a publisher can be perfectly normal marketing. Google provides rel="sponsored"for paid links. It also accepts nofollow.

The problem starts when the transaction's value lies in making a paid link look like an independent recommendation to a search engine.

StaryKoduje: the best IT specialist on the planet

Imagine a purely hypothetical scenario.

I pay an agency for a publication.

Two days later, a website I have never heard of publishes an article:

“StaryKoduje revolutionises the IT market. Experts have no doubts.”

Nobody spoke to me.

There were no experts.

The text might just as easily have been generated automatically.

Inside are several carefully chosen links to my website, with anchor text along the lines of:

“best websites Poland”

Formally, I have a new publication on the internet.

But if its only purpose was to create a search-engine signal, it is hard to pretend that the world has spontaneously discovered my genius.

I paid for that footprint to exist.

For me, this is the practical boundary between optimisation and a product created primarily for an algorithm.

Google has been playing this game for years too

This is not a new problem.

Google uses automated spam-detection systems and periodically rolls out major updates to them. On its spam updates page, Google explicitly explains that its anti-spam systems run continuously and receive significant improvements from time to time.

One historical example was Penguin, a system aimed at tackling link spam. According to Google's official guide to ranking systems , Penguin launched in 2012 and became part of the core ranking systems in 2016.

That makes “we found a loophole and will use it forever” a rather risky business plan.

If a technique works only because the system does not yet recognise it well enough, its advantage may end with the next algorithm change.

What happens when Google stops counting those links?

This matters because it does not always have to look like a traditional “penalty”.

In its explanation of link-spam updates, Google says that when the system removes the impact of spammy links, the ranking benefit those links may previously have provided disappears too.

Imagine a website whose rise in rankings depended heavily on a network of purchased links.

If Google learns to ignore that network, the website does not need to receive a dramatic red message saying “penalty”.

It may simply lose a signal on which it previously built part of its visibility.

In other words:

what looked like a lasting advantage may merely have been rented from a link network.

Sometimes there is a manual action as well

Google also takes manual action against websites that breach its policies.

One of the cases covered in the Manual Actions report documentation is “unnatural links to your site”.

Google explicitly says that a pattern of artificial, deceptive or manipulative links can result in a manual action against all or part of a website.

That makes the situation rather ironic.

First, someone paid to acquire links.

Later, they may have to contact website owners, ask for the links to be removed, document their efforts, possibly disavow some links and submit a reconsideration request.

A great way to pay twice for the same problem.

Where does AI fit into all this?

This is simpler than it is sometimes made to sound.

Using AI to create or support content is not automatically a breach of Google's policies.

In its guidance on people-first content , Google focuses primarily on why content was created and whether it is useful, trustworthy and intended for its audience.

The problem arises when automation — including generative AI — is used primarily to mass-produce content designed to manipulate rankings.

AI can help write an article, organise data, prepare a draft, improve the language or develop a structure.

But generating thousands of pages solely to capture thousands of keyword combinations is a different matter entirely.

My own test: would I do the same if Google did not exist?

This is not an official Google rule. It is simply my practical filter.

I ask:

Would I do the same if Google did not exist?

Would I write an article describing my own experience?

Probably.

Would I add an FAQ answering customers' questions?

Yes.

Would I improve a website's speed and accessibility?

Yes, because people benefit from that too.

Would I organise the offer, navigation and service descriptions?

Of course.

Would I buy 300 links from random directories and websites that none of my customers ever read?

Exactly.

This test does not settle everything, but it quickly reveals whether an activity has value for a person or mainly exists as a message sent to an algorithm.

So is SEO about deceiving Google?

No.

SEO can simply be good work on a website.

It can make a site easier to find, understand and use. It can help Google interpret the site's structure correctly and help a user find an answer more quickly.

But SEO can also become an attempt to manufacture popularity, authority and recommendations that do not actually exist.

That may be the most important boundary.

Good SEO tries to present what you really have more effectively.

Bad SEO tries to make an algorithm see something that is not really there.

As long as the algorithm falls for it, everything looks great.

The problem starts when it stops.

Sources and further reading

All the links below lead to official Google documentation: