Google exploit shows how trust system catches cheating publishers #seo

And finally, the cherry on the cake is from the Google exploit we found in 2023, we found Google had a specific flag for web pages called last significant update, which records the epoch time, which is the Linux timestamp for when they believe the content last had a significant, being in full word, update. So you're not just changing the last published date. And I actually followed this up with Gary Iyesh from Google, who's one of the kind of senior engineer people there. And I said to him, you know, like, What happens if, to all these people that just kind of update the last updated and they're just changing it to 2026, 2027? He said Google has a binary trust system in these cases whereby if you keep changing it and across the board it's consistently not significant update, they just stop basically believing you on that data thread. So there's a bunch of hints that we learned Google You can provide Google, like canonical tags is another one to tell it when 2 pages are basically the same. And if you consistently give Google incorrect or misleading information, it just stops listening to you, which makes your optimization job harder.