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Google is corrupt and dysfunctional as a search engine. (Anybody still uses it?)
They do not like new sites. They will not rank you unless other sites link to you. If you are new and nobody visits your site, you will not get organic backlinks. So the only way to get noticed is to game the system and inject fake, artificial links everywhere until Google pays attention.
In practice, Google pushes you to cheat and play the rigging game they created. They do not seriously evaluate how good your content is. They default to old, established sites for almost everything. It is the safe bet. They save resources on crawling and evaluation, and users get predictable, pre-validated results. Win-win, but you are not in the equation.
This is not an environment where new sites can realistically compete and grow ORGANICALLY. **This is the Google game where you must cheat and pay your way up because you are expected to.**
On the side notes: What I strongly suspect is that once your site does not use Google Analytics – meaning you do not allow Google to track your visitors because of GDPR and whatnot – you are at a serious disadvantage.
I see this pattern consistently across my own sites, and I have no other explanation for it. I think they really use trackers as the signals to save money, crawling and experimenting with results…
