This thinking is the problem.
I'm not sure the best answer is to manually penalize some of the regular players. More will fill their place and it only incentivizes churn and burn behavior.
In short, what I mean to say is you take out big established institutions you consider shady but people are searching for, those people will still seek out even shadier new players to fit their need. It makes them even less safe.
They're already doing that with paid quality raters. I suppose your question is about opening this up more widely, but that's basically giving those spammers a tool to directly influence the ranking, which is going to be even worse.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
The only thing I can think of that'd be tough to deal with is giving that VPN server a second route to the internet, and hiding that behind the biggest consumer CG-NAT you can find. They'll have to use a bogus UA string too.
To be fair, it's well within Google's capabilities. I'm surprised they don't already do something like this, honestly. Trivial? I wouldn't say so.
On a related note: between SEO abuse like this, and the ongoing systematic IP theft by OpenAI, Google, and friends, I worry we're entering an irreversible dark age for the web. Crazy abuses of NAT and UA strings will run rampant, and the only solution will be to serve nothing of value to anyone at all without a paywall.
Google actually did something to improve search!
Looks like people don't acknowledge that # of clicks is no more important metric. That seemed to be important when it was the only meaningful performance metric. But the ultimate metric that matters to money is advertiser budget allocation. If they see Google search performs worse in terms of conversions, they will cut their budget there. And this is the real problem that Google has.
Part of the problem is that they're fighting against financial incentives that they themselves created. There's plenty of upside and little downside to abusing it, so it's just endless whack-a-mole.
Another issue is just how bureaucratic the process has become. They want it to look good to the regulators and the courts, so they put up with a pattern of abuse for five years, then announce some well-reasoned but narrow policy change (e.g. "product reviews now need to be actual hands-on reviews"), and... a month later, spammers are just adding an extra lie on all the fake review websites.
https://github.com/jaronilan/stories/blob/main/Duplicitous.p...
If your business depends on their services, you're fucked if you slip up in the smallest way. Have fun trying to get ahold of anyone who can help, unless you're lucky and have a friend who works there.
Side note, they're going to further penalize apps based on performance/ANRs, yet they haven't fixed the issue of admob's banner ads causing performance issues.
It just feels awful. We need more options that can actually help small businesses, not hurt or threaten them.
Google gives no response just extended the deadline until they remove our account for not providing the DUNs number.
Funny thing is that our number starts with a zero so theoretically it could be 9 characters long but the official lookup requires the 0 prefix
Our apps have been rejected from the Play Store for bogus reasons multiple times. Sometimes it's an easy fix (aka just release the same update but with higher version number - to get another bot or human to take a look), sometimes it takes a week, sometimes we've had to pull strings and had to escalate our issue through a contact at Google. But if you're a small fish, they will absolutely let you rot.
But every graph can be shown nicely and things which are common sense don't need a metric to proof it.