Every time someone wants to pick nits with me they go after my science fiction and fantasy Websites. I have said for years there is no money to be made in science fiction fan sites. That’s not entirely accurate. I know of a very small handful of SF fan sites that make money, enough that they can pay full-time staff, afford corporate-quality Web technology, and even give money to charity. But the vast majority of amateur sites don’t make money.

Then again, if you search on any science fiction book, movie, television show, or an actor or writer associated with the genre, you are sure to find listings from a relatively small pool of “entertainment” Websites that clutter their pages with advertising, popups, and widgets the like of which have supposedly sent thousands of lesser Websites into Google’s bit bucket of Web spam penalties.

These faux fan sites have completely commercialized the queries with absolute dreck. It’s sometimes hard to even find a Wikipedia article amidst this crap. Some queries are topped by IMDB and Wikipedia, which don’t address user intent in the least. And when the user is clearly explicit about wanting to find “fan site” (such as running a query for “ender’s game fan site”) Google still insists on peppering the front page with YouTube, Deseret News, the official Facebook page for the movie, Fanpop, and so on.

You kind of get higher quality results if you search for “hobbit fan site” but as someone who contributes to the Tolkien Society blog from time to time I would have to struggle intellectually to call them “a hobbit fan site”. And how does the Hollywood Reporter count as a “hobbit fan site”?

The Tolkien Society is not in it for the money, and I would rather be shown that listing than yet another spammy Fanpop listing. And I sure do not want to see “the hobbit fan fellowship contest”. These are not fan sites.

The commercial interest in science fiction and similar entertainment (horror, especially anything related to zombies, any Brad Pitt movie, etc.) has suppressed all apparent non-commercial content in the search results, except in queries where you have a few Web-savvy people like me who know how to get out there and promote their Websites. Trust me, I know all the people in the top sites for certain verticals and they know what it takes to compete in money queries.

Which is not to say I am out there buying links or whatever. Last year alone my Tolkien blog earned hundreds of natural links. That’s what I do: earn links. Unfortunately, the average amateur blogger is never going to match the massive “outreach” campaigns that drive links to the commercial Websites. They make it easy for you to embed their pictures (rarely unique and original) on your Websites and in forums: oddly enough, those pictures often come with links.

And, trust me, it’s easy enough to show that the original images are being stolen in a massive slaughter of independent Websites’ content.

You don’t have to limit your searches to science fiction and fantasy. The same thing happens in sports queries, political queries, and just about any type of query where you expect to find images in the content. Video links are not so heavily abused, but if you can grab a picture and embed it in a gallery that anyone can embed on their Website, Google will roll over for you and say, “Here: Screw my SERPs”.

Bing is hardly any better at filtering out all this link noise.

What amazes is that the hard-core community of link bloggers have been silent on this method for so long. If affiliate marketers who employ aggressive linking strategies have not been using image links to dominate search results, they have waited too long. The big players have sucked up all the PageRank.

I’m all for making money from a Website but when you cannot find the thousands of WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and other free-hosted sites that amateurs create to share their passions because Bing and Google can’t get their heads out of Wikis and picture galleries, you have to ask just how deaf, dumb, and blind the average Web search engineer is trying to be. Surely some of these people run queries like this, too?

We would not be seeing all this crap if there were not money to be made in entertainment-related queries. I’m not asking for a piece of the pie (technically, I do make some money from it). What I am asking for is an end to the heartbreak of having to redesign my queries to give me a break from all the over-commercialized crap.

If you’re seriously wondering why desktop traffic is declining in favor of mobile traffic, it’s largely because people can bypass a lot of the commercial fake fan sites by surfing social media recommendations. The personalized search interpretation of those recommendations is truly awful (mostly because Google relies heavily on Google Plus, which is a social media ghost town). Even Facebook can serve better recommendations than Google, and that is the saddest statement about search technology I have ever written.

The problem is that links are used to create an unfavorable advantage for too few Websites. Links are not the most important part of the algorithm. There really is no “most important part of the algorithm”. But in queries where only a few players can drum up thousands of links every year it’s hard to imagine fairly allocated search results.

You really have to ask why Google needs to show results from Business Insider and Collider when you search for cosplay images. Their random articles are neither authoritative nor comprehensive. But they can sure drum up the links for their little galleries because they have such large, search-driven audiences. Meanwhile, if you want to find a real cosplay Website you have to know what to look for.

The search engines are a little safer with queries like “nfl sports blog”. Most sports fans will probably be satisfied with professional bloggers’ commentaries on the American football games because they can head over to a handful of forums and talk sports with random strangers fairly easily.

But why does TheBestColleges.Org appear in the top five listings for “history blog”? History.Com’s blog hardly satisfies, either. It’s about half devoted to promoting History Channel shows and maybe half devoted to commenting on random historical stuff (mostly calendar-driven, in my opinion, which is a lazy way of planning historical writing). But take heart, all you Exact Match Domainers: TheHistoryBlog.com ranks 1st for “history blog”. Gosh, maybe EMDs aren’t dead yet. To be fair, it really is a blog about history (and it has a huge blogroll, too).

I am still trying to rationalize why the American Historical Association’s blog appears in these results. They don’t really have much to do with history blogging. There are occasional articles that deal with actual history.

As marketers begin to smell money in queries the links come out and hit the SERPs hard. So all those miserable stories about Google killing links in 2014: don’t believe them. They are not true.

What Google killed was just the tip of the ice berg. They have not only failed to improve their search results, their learning sets are favoring Websites that populate their pages with more than a dozen ads in some cases. I know because my ad blocking plugin hits double digits more often than not when reporting the ads it blocks.

I wish Google would show us examples of query results where they don’t allow the links to influence the rankings. They say the results look bad. Well, Googlers, I have news for you: the results don’t look good today. I am tired of artificially promoted ad-platforms. Wikipedia is still annoying but I rarely see it listed more than once in a query so I am willing to sacrifice 1 SERP listing per query in the name of low quality content. But if you’re going to allow links to play havoc with your SERPs you have to expect people to continue following the money.

Google should give serious consideration to doing away with the principle of “we MUST show this Website because it is so well-known”. Trust me. Fanpop would not be so well-known if you didn’t allow the links to count that much.