I agree that getting 100s of people to link to LessWrong with the anchor text “rationality” is unlikely to provide much of a benefit (though, hey, it might—search engines are a big black box), but LessWrong is a reasonably well-trusted site (2k backlinks, most of them quite high quality, see here); having 10s of links (and given how much emphasis Google is meant to place on anchor text at the moment), it could give a substantial boost at the margins.
IMO, I think a better question to ask is how many people are searching for the search term “rationality”? Seems like a weird thing to search for.
SEO paperclipping is result of two forces—websites trying to get better ranks, and search engines which build up their defenses.
We might have little competition for rationality, but getting through search engine filters is not as easy as it used to be a decade ago.
I agree that getting 100s of people to link to LessWrong with the anchor text “rationality” is unlikely to provide much of a benefit (though, hey, it might—search engines are a big black box), but LessWrong is a reasonably well-trusted site (2k backlinks, most of them quite high quality, see here); having 10s of links (and given how much emphasis Google is meant to place on anchor text at the moment), it could give a substantial boost at the margins.
IMO, I think a better question to ask is how many people are searching for the search term “rationality”? Seems like a weird thing to search for.
The search engines have their own incentives to avoid punishing innocent sites.