The wife is a web developer and explained it as editing the publication date of an online document
That was created in the past, and changing the date to present day. This causes the article to be pushed to the top of the search results. Google already has a recorded date for the original publication, and this is immediately flagged by the web crawler. When this type of cheating is discovered Google placed a !DISCLAIMER on the document disclosing the original creation date and a note stating that this information is not current. Subsequently the document is pushed to the bottom of searches.
Google frowns on this. They have no issue with updating a document so both the original and updates are available, however in this case the administration was changing the documents, and branding it as newly released. Some documents going back years.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/ice-us-immigration-deportations-google
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