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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

I feel like no matter how Google or any other search engine ranked pages, SEO firms would be there to game the system and make a mess of the web. Making Pagerank visible to people with one particular toolbar does seem like a fairly major misstep on Google's part. The majority of the people who would really care about that are the kind of people you shouldn't be encouraging.

One of the obnoxious things about SEO is that if one person is doing it everybody has to do it. It's not necessarily enough to simply offer a better product at a better price. Luckily Google does try to reduce the effect of SEO. I notice for instance that StackExchange almost always beats out Expert Sex Change links these days.

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I'm not sure how much of it is that google tries to reduce the effects of SEO, or that they just keep moving the target. Every time they change their algorithm it seems like a bunch of sites who were practicing one strategy disappear, and before long a new strategy is discovered causing new sites to rise to the top.

Ultimately Google's ability to quantify both quality and relevance will converge on actual quality and relevance. In other words, the way to "game" the system and practice SEO will be to create a site that is actually relevant with high-quality content. But we're not there yet, and who knows how close we'll actually get.

This is definitely what is happening. I work in SEO and follow the industry closely, but the SEO industry itself is a giant echo-chamber. But essentially what it boils down to is:

- make something your audience wants

- make content your audience wants to share

- "earn" links by creating useful resources & content

Essentially, the way to get great rankings in Google is by actually having a website that people want to go to and is relevant to their interests. Trying to game the system is much harder these days, and honestly for the most part isn't worth the effort.

One thing I seriously dislike about SEO is the value placed in content often above actual practice. So if a client is a plumber, we're realistically telling them to start an e-zine of engaging, shareable content rather than just providing a great service. Or pushing backlinks.

When so much business is decided by a search engine, the plumbing company with people writing "10 crazy plumbing stories you won't believe" beats the plumbers who are out on call each day. Further, if time-on-page is a Google factor, the site with a slideshow or listicle is going to top the one with efficient info and contact details.

The alternative for your hypothetical plumber to get "on Google" is to buy advertising from them. So instead of gaming SEO, or creating e-zine content that's shareable on the "social" sites, he has to buy ad space from Google so that his site shows up on searches.

Side note. Ideally, your plumber's service shouldn't have to be "googled". It should be in some sort of directory, and we shouldn't be using Google for that. The problem is that people are so very reliant on Google to find everything for them that they don't know any other place to do it. And no reasonable competitor (that I know of) has come in to provide such a directory service.

Most "yellow-page" sites I've seen are giant data-dumps of next-to-useless and out-dated pieces of information. No wonder people "google it".

Minor anecdote. Just the other day, I searched for a known name of a website/company (can't remember). And the first hit was their website, but just above it was an Adword ad for them. Not thinking, I accidentally clicked the adword version. That was $1 right there taken from their advertising budget because of a broken web (I'd argue), and simply given to Google.

Yep, I've done that before on browsers without any ad blockers. I'm so used to clicking the first result that looks like what I want that I got bit by an ad. I'll always go out of my way to click the not-ad link if it goes to the place I want.

Well a bad part of it is that "something your audience wants" has proven to be "awful buzzfeed clickbait titles", so human shittiness trumps value in this way

But how much traffic do clickbait titles get from search? I would guess almost none. Clickbait titles are an optimization for social media and "content discovery" ad platforms like Outbrain or Taboola, not search.

You may just be working with a poor definition of value if you consider giving people what they want to be at odds with it.

"Value" is not equal to "what people click on". That's just what's easy to measure. The more you optimize the second goal, the more it will diverge from what people actually value.

Funny thing is, most people don't know what they want, or they do but it's bad for them, or it's good for them but bad for many others.

The set of people whose wants should be satisfied is much smaller than the set of people who want.

Only if you use some vague, hypothetical concept of want. To me wants are the things people pursue. Seeing as people act, the idea that they don't know what they want is silly.

To say that peoples wants are bad for them or they should not get what they want is a paternalistic concept that I don't care for nor find particularly actionable.

You may be working with a excessively technical/economic definition of "value" rather than the common human one, if you believe that the only meaning of "value" is "monetary profit."

Huh? I didn't say anything about monetary profit. Users don't profit monetarily when they read buzzfeed articles so I have no idea how you would have got that idea.

Rather than knee-jerk dismiss the suggested interpretation, why don't you simply tell us how you define value?

Something that people want.

Thanks. That may be your definition, but it's not, oh, say, the neoclassical definition of economic value, it's not even the Austrian / Libertarian definition of value, it's not the classical economic definition of use value from Adam Smith, and it's not even the classical definition of value that you'll find through Greek and Roman philosophy.

Or, say, of concepts of value from ecology and systems theory.

But if you want to have conversations based on your Glory, by all means do.

I sincerely appreciate your letting us know that's your intent so as to avoid considerable wasting of time.

If that's your entire definition of value, it's overly narrow. Lots of people want things that are directly bad for them. Letting a five-year-old eat candy until his teeth fall out is not providing him a valuable service.

To get back to the original subject, reasonable people can perhaps debate whether the explosion in clickbait articles is "good" or "bad" in whatever sense, but it doesn't follow from that that "value" lies solely in satisfying people's most immediate wants.

Yet another case of the HN hive-mind downvoting inconvenient truths.

Is heroin a very high value product?

Absolutely, judging from what people are willing to pay.

Arguments against heroin are invariably rooted in negative externalities. I have never heard anyone argue that there is no demand for heroin.

The "value" of heroin comes from it tricking your brain with chemicals that you need it and will die otherwise. I WANT IT GIVE IT TO ME == value, without follow up questions? Similarly buzz feed tricks you with catchy titles. Oh look the end result was I clicked it, therefore it has tremendous value without further analysis.

"Tricking your brain with chemicals" is a ridiculous way to dismiss something that people like. Every desire or want we have is the result of chemicals.

Our desires and neurochemistry evolved in a very different environment from today. I think it's fair to say that a chemical that mimics an evolved desire/reward system without actually fulfilling the need that system serves is "tricking" the brain.

Because of our different environment, none of those "needs" really exist though. Being part of modern society basically guarantees we stay fed and sheltered. Very few people are trying to procreate as much as they can. Some of us are choosing not to at all.

We eat high calorie foods because our brain tells us its good even though we're a little fat. We fuck each other because our brain tells us its good, while we use contraceptives. We go out and try to be successful because our brain tells us it's good even though our base needs are already provided for.

Sure you can say that we're tricking our brain, but only so far as you can say everything we've done since we discovered conscious thought and developed agency is tricking the brain. Hence why I find pointing it out in a specific case a little silly. "Hey you're only doing that because it feels good!" Well yeah duh? Same reason any of us are doing anything.

> The "value" of heroin comes from it tricking your brain with chemicals that you need it and will die otherwise.

Most people who use heroin do not become addicted. The addiction rate for heroin is 23% according to National Institute on Drug Abuse [1]. Note that this is overall addiction rate, not the percentage of heroin users that are addicted, as most heroin addicts do not remain addicted.

In other words: The value of heroin for most users is the high, not that it satisfies an addiction.

[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/heroin

street price != value

I'm guessing by "negative externalities" you mean "people who object to having their property stolen by desperate junkies, or who would rather not get caught up in the violent fallout from drug gang wars."

How do you propose to put a value on that?

value = street price - net negative externalities

The negative externalities you mention are much more a result of prohibition than of the drug itself. But under current law I'll give you that they're real, though simple policy fixes would largely eliminate them.

The negative externalities to which I'm referring are primarily the addictive nature constraining the users' future choice, and the chance of an early death resulting from overdose (though that is arguably a result of prohibition as well).

Those aren't externalities, just costs.

an externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit

Who said anything about demand? This is what I meant when I said you were defining "value" in narrowly economic terms.

Depends on the person. For some, incredibly so.

As history has proven it almost always does.

As somebody with no dog in this fight, I cannot help but wonder if there's a correlation between PageRank and the rise of referring to text on a page as "Content", rather than, well, "An Article".

Content is just a generic term. If you write a post or a Slideshare that has mostly pictures in it, it's still content but not an article.

Not sure if the parent poster referred to this, but it's not absurd to consider that the term "content" may have harmful connotations.

See Stallman's opinion on this (I know, an extremist view, but I think he has a point):

"Words to avoid (or use with care)": http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Content

> If you want to describe a feeling of comfort and satisfaction, by all means say you are “content,” but using the word as a noun to describe publications and works of authorship adopts an attitude you might rather avoid: it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages the works themselves. If you don't agree with that attitude, you can call them “works” or “publications.”

I think there may be a correlation between this negative phenomenon of gaming pagerank and referring to articles and pictures as "content", as if they were second-class citizens of the web.

I guess my reaction is such that the term "Content" relegates an article (or a slide deck) to being a unit of commerce, rather than a summary of thought (or of emotion).

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=content%2Carti...

This is what SEO firms like to say because it gives them cover and makes people think they're just content writers, but I don't think it's accurate. Backlinks are still king, even if your site has scarcely any content on it; not that it's bad to have more high-quality content, but it's not like Google weighs that strongly. A lot more human curation would be needed to determine that.

You put "earn" in quotation marks, because these aren't organically earned except in a tiny fraction of cases. Most of them are planted.

Obligatory:

https://xkcd.com/810/

I think that by the time that Google is able to quantify quality and relevance, people will be able to use AI to automatically create websites that are relevant and high quality.

I'm not sure whether that is a good thing or not, but it would make sense that the sophistication of the AI used to game Google moves at about the same pace of Google's ability to stop people from gaming its algorithms.

I suspect it's not that hard to get a very rough assessment of quality and relevance - although it would only be useful with a giant multidimensional model of demographics and interests, because "relevant" isn't a scalar.

My guess is Google doesn't do it because it costs too many cycles. Counting backlinks, supplemented by some very basic NLP, is very much cheaper and easier.

The irony is that I wonder if people would pay for - or at least not mind - guided and prompted personal search if it produced highly relevant results.

The sad truth is that the current sneaky lumping of broad demographic guessing with search history with backlink counting and a bit of NLP/timeline voodoo produces mediocre results for many kinds of searches. (I've just spent a very frustrating 15 minutes trying to find out if the raw datasets from KIC 8462852 are available online. Usually my search fu is pretty good, but I couldn't get a definitive answer.)

I'm not sure to what extent Google's sales model relies on this. It's much easier to sell advertising if you don't offer an SLA, because it becomes the customer's fault if the service doesn't provide high quality results.

A more effective service would increase ad buyer confidence and the price of niche ad sales would increase, but maybe not by enough to compensate for the loss of more generic ad sales overall.

There is no scientific definition of quality, so this can't happens (even if there is a easy ascertainment of garbage). Google is used to confuse quality and popularity, so maybe we will end with the more popular texts, ideas, beliefs, etc. on the top.

People will still be able to game that scenario, just copy-paste from elsewhere.

Google is, like any ranking system, subject to Goodhart's law[1]. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

What has been Google's saving grace has been their skill at updating their target, attempting to turn the chaos and effort from SEO towards improvement in content. They have made an impossible problem into a mostly-solvable control systems[2] problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_system

I see it slightly differently, the issue is money. When page rank was simply an internal relevance metric it was fine, but when page rank was the way to change how much revenue ads on your page brought you, well then it became much more than "relevance."

Brad Templeton made the observation way early on that his humor mailing list went to over ten million people. If people sent him a penny if they laughed, and only 1% did, he would make $30,000 a month or $360,000 a year just for curating jokes. Scale + pennies can add up to big dollars on an individual level.

PageRank, AdSense, AdWords, all fed this mechanism with a way to turn a small amount of work by an individual into disproportionate returns. It really has been no surprise that the web spam problem became much much worse than the email spam problem. There was a better built in payment mechanism.

>It's not necessarily enough to simply offer a better product at a better price.

It's not nearly enough to offer a better product at a better price. Our company, which was objectively superior to the bad imitators that followed us, was eviscerated by a competitor with a pedigree as a professional spammer -- his product rarely worked and we were constantly getting refugees once they were able to wade through the massive amounts of spam that promoted his solution and find some genuine information. It didn't help that he bought off niche webmasters to delete any mention of our service from their forums and only allow mention of his service.

I have accepted it as a reality that "SEO consultants" (read: professional spammers) are a necessity if your site is going to get anywhere. Note we've always been SEO optimized, meaning our site was always search engine friendly and it contained a great deal more relevant content than our competitor's site. But because our competitor enlisted his network of spam websites to manufacture backlinks and actively sought to exclude mention of my product from the internet by paying off webmasters, he performed much better.

People don't know and generally don't care if your product is better or worse. If you have a product that looks like it's functioning, that's all the development that needs to be done as long as it half-works 5-10% of the time. The rest of the money needs to go into spa--err, sorry, "internet marketing".

> I notice for instance that StackExchange almost always beats out Expert Sex Change links these days.

True, but they very often don't beat out numerous websites that have taken the open StackExchange content (or other similar, more specialized forums) and rehosted it on a new domain. This behavior should be easy to kill, Google should consider this blacklistable behavior and have an easy way to report any site doing it, with the number of StackExchange users out there these sites would be blacklisted within hours of being launched and before long peolple would simply stop doing it. But for some reason it is allowed to continue.

Consider this attack:

1) copy paste from from any random site to a StackExchange comment 2) report the original site for scraping StackExchange 3) lulz

The StackExchange content is open, so I don't think the offending sites are doing anything wrong per se, excluding making the internet worse.

And you think Google won't be able to compare timestamps of when each piece of content was inserted/updated?

Also Quora. I luckily almost never see Quora results anymore. For a while, maybe a couple of years back, they'd rank on the first page for many technical queries. Clicking through would give you the question and a blocked answer. Really glad that Google decided that those businesses shouldn't win, because it's a really sleazy model.

PageRank wasnt bad. But the 'game-able' mechanism went on way too long.. and it was compounded when Google "went to bed" with SEO firms

> it was compounded when Google "went to bed" with SEO firms

What does this comment refer to?

It just seems like Google was incentivised to have a relationship with SEO firms to make page rank work.

I doubt that. Google is Google because it was/is better than others at finding relevant information.

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