Every site wants traffic, and I've been guilty of gaming search results myself in the past, but also don't forget the other big conflict here:

Google wants ad revenue.

As such, if you are small and do it honestly, you have very little chance of getting any actual traffic your way because Google sends everyone to the "big end of town" and search engines / internet marketing has become a pay to win platform.

Back links made sense when we were all linking to each other early on because it was how you found good content, but nobody is linking to anyone anymore - unless it's for some return to the linker, such as making a high traffic blog post with affiliate links etc - and it's time to come up with another method.

Right now most effective for me to get information / reviews is add "Reddit" to the search and you get a discussion of the pros and cons. I've been using chatgpt for a surprising amount of "I just need to know this general info" kind of stuff. Ie I used chatgpt to work out the temperature and time it would take to dehydrate lemons in the oven, and also how to clean said oven with what I had on hand. Both of these would have been much more time consuming to do the traditional way, and I would have been bombarded with ads and people's life stories before they get to the "just use vinegar" part