How SEO Ruined the Internet
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Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content.
Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content.
In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of content created, unfortunately, as we are going to explain in a moment, it has been ruined by SEO.
¿Is it SEO really the reason content was ruined?
Some people argue that SEO is not really the reason content was ruined, we will review all the reason why SEO could be really ruining content.
Please, click "next" to know why SEO could be ruining content.
hoping someone else chimes in with other thoughts because I used to know more about this, and SEO cheapening quality content was one of the key takeaways I had.
The Internet is the exact opposite of what it was meant to be. Instead of giving efficient access to high-quality information, it gives inefficient access to watered down, spread-down, low-quality interaction. Site after site, query after query, we all continuously pay a little tax with our time.
Now, that I have some money, I am willing to pay for subscriptions, because that would mean high quality content, not because of ads. However, there were times in my life when I barely had what to eat and I barely afforded to pay for the Internet connection and paying subscriptions was the last things I was willing to do.
I suppose many of the 7 billion people living on Earth are poor enough to not afford paying for subscription.
This is a sad result of incentives which ruined RSS, semantic web, and the original purpose of the Internet: to effectively share and communicate information globally.
Advertising (including propaganda and surveillance) and copyright are major forces in that ruination - not to say they don't have legitimate uses and benefits, but their concentrated financial interests conquered the domain. It's a kind of colonialism of public (cyber)space and collective mind.
Tax is an apt analogy, since the power lies in the control of "media" in the most general sense, to force itself in every transaction between things and people.
I believe "dis-intermediation" will help improve the free and direct flow of information. That is, to reduce the middle layers - the gate keepers, the walled gardens, intercepts (lawful or not), filters - by re-decentralizing the net.
... And that was when we realized that the kindling was all damp. What to do! Four hours we ...
... it reminded of our travels in Italy ...
... And that brings us to our famous three-ingredient peanut butter cookie recipe:
After a few years of writing recipes, one can transition to screenplays and novels. :)
> This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.
I can also do without sites that think they're being quirky with their newsletter popups. "Click here to subscribe" or "I'm not interested in staying informed/saving money/being in shape". Stop. You're trying too hard.
We are very lucky that, as far as we know, an accumulation of irony doesn't create black holes.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SEO+ruined+content&t=canonical&ia=...
To be fair, "SEO ruined content" is a pretty specific search string and doesn't even show up in the results that out-rank this submission. This comment specifically talks about "SEO ruined content" and is, correctly, a good results candidate.
And now on first page
Keyword Difficulty < 15
Ahrefs estimate that you’ll need backlinks from ~17 websites to rank in top 10 for this keyword
Google or not, what can help me discover the right recipe, the right content, the right answer to my coding error?
Search algorithms that keep “mutating” even randomly? Ranking system? What?
You need people, basically. If you want to automate it, you need some way to figure out what people think about that content. This has been tried by counting how many people link to it, or rate it highly, but those methods have also been gamed to death.
Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients.
How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had something that would scan for words and their synonyms and tag articles, a rescan feature for tags that got added after the fact, and various other utilities.
Something bothered me about this question, and I think it's the way it frames Google's role as being a passive participant.
Google doesn't "allow" anything. Google writes the rules and picks the winners.
When you search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe," Google's search algorithm goes "Here's a nice webpage with Grandma Betty's life story and a paragraph about how to make chocolate chip cookies at the bottom. This is what you were looking for."
Recipe sites look like they do because Google forces them to look like that if they want Google to send them any search traffic.
Is there a different algorithm that would give more useful results? Is there a way to rank the sites on how well they present the information you were searching for? Is there a way to factor in whether a site has good recipes or terrible ones? I don't know, but I don't have a giant advertising money fountain and teams of very well paid engineers.
Like you hinted at, I think it's reasonable to suspect Google for not having an incentive to fix this. They get their ad money either way, and they probably get more of it from worse sites. As long as it's good enough to keep people from switching to other search engines en masse, they're not losing anything.
It's not just some simple disinterested mathematical orchestration without any engagement or other layer
I was an editor for a few categories at DMOZ. Not only I allowed only good content in our categories, but I checked older approvals from time to time to see if they behave. I had to delist some websites who thought they can trick us.
Pay for a Cooks Illustrates or NYT Cooking subscription and all these problems go away.
I assume (?) it is not google engineers tuning for this particular outcome on purpose...
Not all that plain and simple.
I have a copy from probably 5 years ago that seems to be out of print and can be had for $7 used. It's 900+ pages of well-tested recipes where each one has a narrative about how they tested and arrived at the final recipe.
Cooks Illustrated is amazing, the rigor they go through testing everything, and adapting to available ingredients, makes for such incredible reliability!
You searching for a bibimbap recipe and their page is split into Hangul and English pages and this was the recipe their grandma uses? You bet your ass it's going to be good.
You find something on allrecipes.com, how do you know if this is a good recipe? Only if you already know it is.
You'll still have to suffer through a certain amount of SEO bullshit, you probably don't wanna just go to Amazon and try buying the best-selling cookbook in whatever cuisine you're interested in because that's got its own Amazon-specific SEO clogging things up, but...
Most are black and white only and don't even have pictures.
Grandpa used to read that.
If one gets wet (not at all inconceivable for something used in the kitchen) you merely have to dry it out. It will be slightly wrinkly but it will work fine, unlike a wet phone/tablet/laptop. It’ll have the dish you’re interested in plus a whole lot more, you probably won’t want to make every single one of them but there’s probably gonna be a few that look worth trying.
It will not track you. It is easy to store where it is needed. If you want to make notes - maybe you loved this dish and hated that one, maybe you made a variant that your SO loved - it’s easy to make them with a pen or pencil, and have them visible without any extra interaction. It’s a pretty useful technology!
What is one "cup" of flour? It obviously depends on how fine the flour is. Use grams! Use ounces! But above all use some kind of real measurement!
Maybe I've watched too many infomercials and soaps. I've reached a point where I know Americans don't have (electric) kettles, but a scale seems like a necessity for anybody who cooks.
(I guess there are lot of people, American, or otherwise, who just don't cook. So I'd understand in that case. But cooking without a scale just seems surprising. Even where I come from a grew up with a balance-scale with brass weights. Never hugely accurate, but always available.)
People seem to prefer to use the kinda old-fashioned manual kettles you place on the top of a stove.
8 fl oz of flour spooned into the measuring cup or 4.5 oz. by weight.
I'm not at all trying to be snarky here. Like any other specialization people who cook have organic terminology that is useful to the in-group but confusing to the out-group. A /24 isn't the same as a class C network but we all know what is being conveyed.
And you'll get much more accurate measurements of small quantities measuring by volume instead of weight since kitchen scales aren't that accurate. Knowing that 0.25 tsp is about a gram for just about any granular thing will probably do better than your scale.
It also helps convey the sig figs in recipe. Very few recipes have a tolerance of 1 g. Even finicky bread doesn't get that accurate so it's ridiculous when some bloggers write something like 113 g when without question the recipe was originally formulated to be 4.0 oz and you just messed up the conveyed tolerances by blindly converting.
Most of the time when I'm cooking and I see an American recipe I just google the conversion; a cup of milk is easy to deal with. Just a minor irritation most of the time, but for some things it matters.
If you want some recipes that don't have all that nonsense associated, I'd recommend the BBC's Food site[0].
"Here is this stock photo of something near, we're going to teach you how to make it!" {4 unrelated steps} {stock photo again} "Tada!"
> This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter...
Online recipe sites will always be absurdly verbose, because if they just posted a list, Google would either rank it poorly because it is "thin content", or scrape it and post it as a Featured Snippet. There is seemingly no in-between.
The site authors have no choice but to fill it with a bunch of warbling about their childhood, to meet Google's minimum word count, which of course the company swears doesn't exist.
The problem of course is that search crawlers can't tell the difference between between the two and so long but empty content is treated the same.
I wish I'd be around to see what future historians / archaeologists make of this.
I mean, don't they have server costs? It's like they own an infinite amount of money bucket that constantly gets refilled somehow.
Why are advertisers even paying them for such impressions? Are they so ridiculously retarded in their business model? Can we all hurt advertisers by setting up a website like this?
The reason you even got a chance to click on it is because they wrote it that way. If they didn't, it wouldn't be as visible in Google = nobody would see it. When most websites do this (to survive) folks don't have a choice.
Also, advertisers don't pay for something that's invisible.
What if algorithm changes will tank your all your fleet of poor content websites you've spent last few years on?
- Autoplayinig video ads
- Affiliate marketing (meal kits, cooking courses, etc)
- Adsense display ads
- Taboola/Outbrain
These don't bring in much money on a per-site basis, but the owners usually own multiple sites, so it can add up.
If you're able to get the site to grow, it becomes the easiest digital property in the world to maintain. The content doesn't need to be fresh, or engaging. People will always search for generic recipes.
That is, we will have them, once someone adds them.
I'd like to know when to water my mint plant without reading about the whole history of mint.
"There's going to be a Web Spam Squashing Summit next week: Thursday, Feb 24th. (2005). Technorati is organizing the event (thanks guys!) and we're hosting it on-site at Yahoo in Sunnyvale. The main goal to get the tool makers in a room together to talk about web spam, share info, and brainstorm. So far AOL, Google, MSG, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo are on board. I hope we'll also have representation from Feedster, WordPress (hi Matt), and Ask Jeeves and/or Bloglines too."[1]
The next year, in 2006, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, addressed the Search Engine Strategies conference.[2]
"The search advertising market – a tremendous credit to you and to the organization that built this conference..."
And that's when Google turned evil. From trying to stop search spam, to promoting it.
Google WILL bend over backwards for paid search agencies that direct their clients ad spend through AdWords - but this is not SEO. These paid search agencies that funnel millions to AdWords will get invited to Mountain View, get paid lunches, visits from Googlers, etc. - but this is SEM not SEO.
What does Google do for SEOs? They have a handful of ambassadors that answer questions on a weekly basis. While they are generous with their time (https://twitter.com/JohnMu), they keep things very close to the chest regarding the details of their algorithms. They will send some speakers to some SEO conferences, but will rarely if ever sponsor an SEO conference unless it's a part of a broader paid advertising or marketing tech conference.
Google's Algorithm updates - https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-algorithm... - rolling out every month or so are notoriously a black box and frustrate SEOs to no end!
Everyone else is basing their judgement on the effect google has on the Web.
I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a common but complex term, am I looking for a specific article that I vaguely remember a phrase from, do I want something I've seen before, or am I in the mood to discover new, unexpected things?
Also, I just don't want to see results from some sites. Let me tweak the importance of some sites, rather than relying on Google's gameable algorithms.
Of course some of those top sites, especially the blogging and self-hosting platforms, can still contain obscure stuff that might be just what I'm looking for.
Also as a non native speaker you appear to be rude.
Google showing results for director's commentary of God of War when someone searches "Lord of War director's commentary" is arguably not a failure on Google's part if more people do search for the game than the movie, regardless of the incorrect title.
That said, I completely agree with the theses of TFA. SEO is a cancer.
- "Don't know what to tell you."
- "The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear to exist, at least not objectively."
In my limited experience I don't see any reasons to use these exact words in this context except to belittle..?
Anyone care to explain? My seatbelt is fastened and I'm ready to learn (and apologize if necessary :-).
The first quote is potentially a dismissal, which is belittling. However, if it stood alone, it could also be interpreted as the person backing off because they lack qualification to interpret the results. But the second quote includes dismissal terms like "complaining" and "not objectively" in a demeaning context.
So, with all that, I'd say your impression is valid. The context highly suggests that these responses were meant to belittle the parent author's contribution to the conversation.
Here is my take on the parent's search results. The God Of War director ( Cory Barlog ) was a big part of the marketing for the game. And he did some in-game commentary for it too. So, this suggests some kind of SEO manipulation. But it could also just be the google spellcheck guessing wrong.
The poster who said he was having difficulty getting good results from Google, was obviously venting about his own personal experience.
Next comes along another poster who says "I tried it. I don't have your problem." Another post down, "... The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear to exist, at least not objectively."
Excuse my outburst, but who the fuck says that?
The original poster was venting about a problem he experienced. What good can someone do when he comes in and says that he doesn't experience the same problem, and states that it likely doesn't exist? There is no upside here. There's an only a downside: being rude.
>There is no upside here. There's an only a downside: being rude.
Says the person who apparently created a green account just to shit on my grammar and cast aspersions on me.
Pot, meet kettle.
It doesn't appear that you did. The search term in question is "lord of war director's commentary," and you say you're trying "lord of war." And even if the problem didn't exist for you, but did for them, that does not mean it doesn't exist "objectively."
It's not even suggesting both God of War and Lord of War, for me all the results on the first page are about God of War.
Today I use DDG mostly, thanks to Googles choices. DDG is equally bad WRT this but
- it is easier to move from DDG to Google (just add !g) than the other way around
- and DDG isn't as invasive
Having to click an extra link or maybe scroll beyond the front page doesn't make Google a shit show.
I see these claims all the time, but usually with zero examples.
Maybe I've just adapted to typing in words and phrases into Google in a way that brings up the results I'm looking for.
One example: this weekend I was looking for lyrics from the British folk band Why?. I know they exist; my brother has a bunch of their albums. I have quoted lyrics at Google, I've searched for it on Youtube, I've searched for the band name combined with song titles or names of band members, and I found tons other bands and other random crap, but not the band I was looking for. Eventually I searched for a very specific phrase that was also the title of one of their live albums: "Jig at a Why? Gig", and that finally turned up results.
It's an obscure band, and their name being a common word certainly doesn't help, but certainly combined with song titles, lyrics and band members, it should be pretty clear what I'm looking for? But with Google giving strong preference to the most popular results, Google becomes primarily good at finding things you don't need a search engine for to find them. I want a search engine that's good at finding things that are lost, rather than in plain sight.
Now there are times where I can’t remember the song title, but I can type a few lines of lyrics verbatim plus include the musician’s name and get only random, unrelated links.
Once pressed to give actual examples, we realize it wasn't a trivial search anyways and certainly not something better Google did long ago on a technical basis. And Bing certainly isn't doing much better.
Of course, there are some things that Google does filter out these days like things that seem like pirated content.
- Error messages
- Error codes
- IC part numbers
When I was still in an office with coworkers a while back, we had developed the habit of yelling "fuck you Google!" and showing a middle finger at the monitor whenever a search yielded absolutely WTF or useless results, which was a cue to everyone else around to jump in and help. A stronger tirade of profanity was reserved for when someone managed to trip the bot-detector CAPTCHA hellban. At first only the former happened once or twice a week, but shortly before working from home, we were getting Google-screwed multiple times a day, and tripping the hellban so often that most of us switched to a combination of Bing and Yahoo; while still not ideal, and the results weren't much better, at least we weren't routinely getting banned from them for trying harder to find what we were looking for.
- For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to enclose our queries in double quotes and set the "verbatim" option.
- Ad targeting has been so bad it has been ridiculous. Yes, on average it works but around the edges it is somewhere between tragic and hilarious. For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays, not tech conferences, not magazine subscriptions, not offers from local shops, but scammy dating sites that was so ridiculous that I cannot imagine how most people would fall for them. (For a while I wondered if this was all a fluke but now I have confirmed it happens to others in my situation as well.)
- Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example: what is the idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while I'm logged in with two different google controlled accounts, one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?
Maybe we frequent vastly different websites, but this has absolutely not been true for me, even for companies who are supposed to be experts at using their data. I don't think I've ever seen an ad that has actually been relevant, and I'm not even trying to hide my habits or behaviors.
For example, take Amazon. Their ads all over the web frequently recommends me stuff I've already bought just a month ago, the very same product. Or the products they recommend are way out of my zone, like woman clothing while I never purchased woman clothing or anything close to it.
So, I'm not sure how the ad market even goes around and my friends are describing the same behavior from the ads, even from companies that have my entire shopping history already (like Amazon)
> Maybe we frequent vastly different websites...
I think we agree. What I mean is on average it works for Google, not that it works for us. They still makes boatloads of cash.
For what I know the targeting is equally bad for you and me and everyone and they are just convincing advertisers that is worth paying for despite this.
The ad market's business isn't delivering right ads to you, it's convincing people paying for those ads to part with their money. It doesn't have to work well, as long as it works a bit, and there isn't any better alternative around.
Good lord, yes. If I type two words, I want preference for sites that contain both of them, yet the first results all have either one or the other, because surely I must be more interested in a popular site that uses only one of these, right? Google is sometimes too smart, trying to interpret exact words I type as vaguely related words. Sometimes that's relevant, but often it's not.
> "For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays,"
They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need anymore because you already found it. I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet. Except with bad advertising, apparently.
Say you searched for a TV a month ago. Now you're seeing lots of ads about TVs. Stupid Google.
But is it? A substantial fraction of those people are returning their TV because something is wrong with it. Now they are looking for another TV set.
Sure, the majority keeps their TV. But it is still profitable to target all those TV buyers, because they have self-selected into the set of people who really want a TV now, and they are willing to pay.
Reaching the fraction of those who need another one is probably[1] very lucrative.
[1] I'm sure Google has run the numbers
People will rebuy good products, or be stimulated to replace other similar products (bought a new TV for the kitchen, now the lounge TV seems dated, new boots feel awesome get another pair for when they wear out, new $thing is fun buy one for friends birthday.).
There's also a big place for brand enforcement. Show Sony stuff, to remind someone ['s subconscious!] they bought Sony.
A tertiary effect is what I call the "Starbucks Purposeful Bad Naming effect" - you get ads for the exact TV you bought -- beyond the brand reinforcement, etc., you also get to tell everyone you meet a weird story about how "internet advertising is broken ..." and "yes, my new Sony TV is great thanks, you should get one".
Those ad agencies aren't stupid; they have metrics for their metrics and have tracking that can tell you to the second when your gut bacteria burps ...
Stupid they aren't, but I don't think they're smart in the way they are.
Ad attribution is a hard problem. Or, in other words, it's hard to estimate which $ spent on which advertising activities generated how many $ of profit where. That gap is a huge opportunity to scam the product vendor out of their money.
So the ad agency has a metric for their metric, and their reports overflow with numbers and various charts shaped like food or aquatic mammals. But does that mean anything at all? It might not. Statistics is hard, and as long as the vendor isn't better at it than the agency, money can be made. I used to work next desk to a group of content marketers who had no fucking clue about what their numbers mean, but their customers didn't have a clue either, so they happily paid money in exchange for reports that showed the Facebook campaigns "worked".
Now advertising industry is large, and by definition filled with companies that aren't a paragon of virtue and honesty. These companies specialize, providing building blocks and platforms for each other, and they compete internally. It's not like people building tools for lies and manipulation are suddenly honest when dealing with their in-industry customers and competitors. After all, convincing advertisers that your A/B testing package is worth the money requires... well, advertising.
So my personal view on the industry is that it's mostly self-reinforcing bullshit. Doesn't change the fact that it generates stupid amounts of money, though.
Clients were clueless: they had their metrics and they looked at them often, but from my interactions, deep understanding of those metrics and the realities behind them was lacking. The chain of technologies was patchwork and would rarely support all the required features from ad-serve back up to agency: click and view attribution was especially flaky and inconsistent. The adserving environment we worked in (in app) often had issues with view attribution, and we'd tell clients that, but we knew for a fact that some of our competitors didn't and clients would always ask us why our view attribution numbers were worse.
Combine that with more suspect behaviour from suppliers and competitors than you can poke a stick at (questionable traffic sources and campaigns that were probably outsourced from under you, suspect and plausibly forged numbers, etc) means that most of the metrics are plausibly poisoned with illegitimate data to a degree that is difficult if not impossible to nail down, which more or less makes lots of those metrics worthless.
> So my personal view on the industry is that it's mostly self-reinforcing bullshit. Doesn't change the fact that it generates stupid amounts of money, though.
Couldn't agree more.
The big reason advertisers show the ads for products you already purchased is also to reinforce their brand. If you buy some stupid cable, you wont remember the name of the company that made it, but you will if they show you the add couple of times in a row and will likely to buy the things there again even if it not the same product.
> But is it?
Yes, because Google knows who started searching for TV's again and who didn't.
There's an eschatological trait to targeted advertising, as it seems to be all about past sins. So I'm not too sure about your evaluation and AI's own claims…
The scary thing about AI is that, even as the algorithms have greater and greater intelligence, we're still not much closer to teaching them to do what we want them to do. They can game the system better than ever, and then the universe is tiled with surgical masks.
Just because we created the AI doesn't mean it'll care about us. That's like saying a maths problem will try to make your favourite number its answer, just because you wrote it. No, you are the one who must make its answer the number you want. It won't happen by chance.
Corollary: you can't patch broken FAI designs. Reinforcement learning (underlying basically all of our best AI) is known to be broken; it'll game the system. Even if they were powerful enough to understand our goals, they simply wouldn't care; they'd care less than a dolphin. https://vkrakovna.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/specification-gam...
And there are far too many people in academia who don't understand this, after years of writing papers on the subject.
Something as simple as Apache Lucene would beat Google's algorithm any day for relevance.
But I guess Google doesn't care for relevance, they just care to show you ads.
It is, however, technically a potential benefit that the more exactly advertisers can target you, the more relevant ads you could be seeing, which is a wonderful sales pitch for users who are agnostic anyway, but that's not how advertising works in practice.
1. I'm well aware of this
2. It doesn't contradict anything I wrote
3. I've read it so many times and seen it misapplied so many times it is getting annoying.
> so it's only natural that the ads you see aren't personalized. That's never been the goal.
I doubt it was the intent of the advertisers to waste expensive impressions on people who weren't in the target audience at all, so I'm pretty sure they expected some personalization WRT which customers gets what ads.
I also very much doubt that it was Googles intention to annoy me to the point where I trash them in public foras, I just don't think they're capable of fixing it anymore as they are way to busy "being Google", e.g. doing cool stuff while not listening to customers (I was planning to add more here, but this single example seems to summarize it well.)
I recognize I might be a bit more direct than usual here and you aren't responsible for the first 97 times I've seen this meme here but as an answer to my question it is not applicable as far as I can see an also generally that meme is just noise here at HN now.
(Anyone who is actually in todays 10000 lucky WRT the "you're not the customer" meme, feel free to prove me wrong.)
I'm sorry that I seem to have offended you.
My post may contain a meme but it was directly relevant to the post above.
Mentioning that I'm not Googles customer is significantly less relevant (I think irrelevant) when it is obvious that it should have been in the actual customers best interest to avoid spamming me with expensive and utterly irrelevant ads.
Then it's high time everyone but advertisers stopped using google search and start using anything but.
If advertisers are their customers, so be it; let them have it.
And the worst thing is that this is all done to keep those ad dollars flowing. Look at how many companies always have a paid advert associated with their name when a search is made. They are paranoid about losing rank due to Google fiddling their algorithm or someone else doing a better SEO job using their brand.
Random string of text still matches exact in quotes: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9CI%20really%20don%27...
To intentionally discourage you from using Firefox so you give in and switch to their stalker browser.
- Affiliate spam from douchebags that provide "reviews" of products just to link back to Amazon. Makes it nearly impossible to find actual reviews of products.
- People who type whole sentences in natural language into Google. I tried since I used the internet to serach for keywords, omit as much words as possible that aren't necessary. Most people (after I guess ~2010?) don't. This worsens the results.
I would type `protein content brussels sprouts` (without quotes) because I fully understand that the information I'm seeking might be in some tabular form, or phrased in a way I don't anticipate.
Most non-technical people however would type in `What is the protein content of brussels sprouts?` literally.
This leads content creators who see these queries in "keyword analysis tools" to dump SEO-optimized crap into millions of blog posts, with completely irrelevant word soups with countless varations of the question, and the actual information buried deep within that gibberish essay, unreadable by humans, only optimized to drive ad traffic.
Google's optimization for the non-technical use case has lowered the overall search result quality immensely.
There was a time when Google didn't simply ignore some of your search words, or when control characters like +, -, and "" were actually respected (~pre 2010), and the introduction of verbatim mode didn't change much IMHO.
This was good, because it cured all the copy&pastable 2000s era "tag cloud" sites which simply dumped tons of search keywords all over the place.
Ideally, it lead to a stronger emphasis on high-quality human-written content, but it turns out that this algorithm, again, is easily fooled by feeding it "SEO essays" that looks like prose, but is irrelevant text gibberish, but written coherently.
That lead content creators to expand data that would ideally be presented in tabular form on one page, to multi-page "SEO prose" that looks like it's written for humans, but is completely undigestible.
That, along with Google's auto-suggestion feature that finish your sentences after you type in some words, especially on mobile, lead to the impression that people actually like to search in full sentences.
[1] I seem to have thought so in last December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665232
I sometimes wonder if they've hired some ex-googlers lately because yes, this is my experience as well ;-)
My experience was horrible. I don't tend to search 'popular' subjects, only technical ones, and hobbyist stuff. DDG was just plain useless for this, I had to switch back to google after about a week as I was using the !g prefix almost all the time.
It’s gotten so bad that I’ve installed BasiliskII and SheepShaver [1] just so I can relive the nostalgia of the days when I had my first Macintosh, before I’d even had access to the Internet for the first time. The help system and the documentation for software back then was so much more exhaustive than it is today!
Also related to SEO I think is every cooking recipe seems to be 6 to 8 large images and a bunch of unneeded text followed by the recipe 8 to 12 screens down. AFAICT it's entirely not related to me getting to the recipe and instead either a pattern for SEO or ads.
I mean literally, search for any recipe, click the first 10 links. Screens and screens if large pictures and superfluous text with actual recipe way way down the page.
Tweaking importance of some sites seems like a nice idea though, but it could also be a bad thing.
All Google returns is page after page of recipes and posts about Banquet pot pies that have no connection to my input. Google used to be so good at this kind of thing. I know the answer exists somewhere because I found it once a long time ago searching for answers to the same question. Google found it then.
Similarly with the pot pie, the filling retains a ton of heat, so it still is cooking for those few minutes, as the heat dissipates. If you left it in the oven five minutes longer (to 'finish') then put it in cold water (like the egg), you would have a pie in a similar, though wetter, condition.
If you're looking for more technical results, it'll take a more technical approach.
You should learn search operators - https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en - that allow you to control the results for specific sites or very detailed requests.
Even better, set up a custom search engine - https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/4513882?hl=en - with 100 of your trusted sites and now you have Google search precisely tuned to your needs.
... and then meet again, in say, 3 years, where this content is either only findable on tiktokterest or not at all anymore.
Google has not a search problem. It has a chronological and social one.
It was a lot easier finding things in 2004 than today.
That's because it tries to be clever and use synonims and search for terms it deems as related instead of actual search terms.
But there still is great content on the web, it just becomes harder to find in all the noise. I think websites like HN and Reddit and - to some degree - sites like Twitter with their human-based curation are really important for this, so I'm glad they're thriving.
But then that became the table stakes, and people had to start resorting to dirtier tactics. Or just more annoying ones.
During this shelter in place period, I've been reading a lot more recipes online. Every one of them starts with the person's life story. And I get it, maybe how that recipe came to exist is interesting. But at least put a link right at the top that says "skip to recipe" or something. Sometimes I want to read the story, sometimes not. Make it easy for me skip!
I put a recipe on my own website, it's literally a .txt file with just the recipe, ingredients right at the top. I posted a picture of the final product on the internet recently, and a friend asked for the recipe, so I sent him the link.
He replied "the format and delivery method of this is almost more satisfying than the recipe itself".
That's how I know we've gone too far in SEO.
1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams.
Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.
The real problems are that Google is directing the bulk of traffic to certain brand name websites. Another real problem is that Google set a simplistic AI with a goal of increasing clickthrough from search results and decreasing bounce rates. This leads to developers building all those top 10 lists where you have to click through each item (harder to bounce that way), and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.
I also agree Google should be showing smaller websites more frequently - perhaps optimize for a different goal than the one listed above. More weight on keyword matching perhaps or maybe following only a few "authoritative" users CTR & bounce rate habits.
Typical SEO cargo cult behavior. This worked at one time, or at least it seemed to work, so we'll just keep doin' it.
I can't really blame SEO people, though. As long as Google keeps its algorithms secret, I'm not sure what else they're supposed to do except publish good content and hope for the best - which, in an ideal world, would be good enough, but…
When a site is acting up like that I just click and hold, and this brings up an extended list of previous pages. I kinda assume everyone knew about that feature; it seems to work in all major browsers.
Biz ops says increasing revenue for [random Google bs] by ranking Y over Z in the results, so it happens. M&A says Rotten Tomatoes won't give us all their data, their users and their firstborns so they won't show up, even on page 2.
This is literally what antitrust was created for. Companies do this naturally when they get too successful, it's on us to remind them who pays the bills.
By us I mean the US govt so we're basically fucked.
I'd imagine Mr Trump tweeting: "Google is broken. I am the only one that can fix it."
I find it hard to believe that in a world where Google and Facebook’s users were its customers and not its product, it wouldn’t be able to find a way to combat SEO effectively, especially considering how they are basically hoarding the majority of the smartest people in the world.
I've noticed that on google.co.uk, unless you add 'uk' at the end of your search query you'll always get US sites first [1]. Google clearly lump all English based queries into the same geo-graphical bucket - they never used to do this.
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[1] Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I am.
They never seem to know where you are in a way that would actually be useful to you, but always do for their own creepy tracking reasons.
I often look for recipes in French or German and it's impossible to find anything. I try to browse to google.de/fr, I try adding site:.fr but it will still try and give me the most English results. My Google search settings indicate I am happy with German and French results but it seems to have no affect...
SEO will always be a game of cat and mouse. The original algorithms were designed to surface useful content relevant to the search query with the limitations of the technology at the time (so they could be gamed).
Nowadays technology has improved and processing power is much cheaper so it should be possible to use machine learning to recognise what’s “good” and what’s SEO spam and thus get ahead of the SEO crowd again.
The problem here is that the spam sites are also the ones with ads (often Google ads), so there is no financial incentive for Google to actually do anything about those.
We all like to shit on Google but there's no search engine even remotely close to the quality of results. Of course, there's a lot of spam associated with SEO, hacking attempts, spam comments, e.t.c. There are side effects of its algorithm of course, that are negative to web.
If you were to go back to the same search result page and click on another result within a short timeframe they will assume you “bounced”.
They also have Google Analytics littering the majority of the web, so I’m assuming that gives them a signal as well.
Google links directly to search results now, they stopped using the tracking redirect years ago. They probably track clicks and scrolling directly on the SERP with JS.
Google Analytics is absolutely not used for ranking purposes. GA is far too unreliable and gameable to be used for anything like that. It's more likely that Chrome and Google Safe Browsing are used for tracking user hits.
I rather open a new tab from search results and close it instead of clicking the link and going back. I imagine many people do that.
Instead let’s upvote articles on how to build search engines, how search indexing could be improved, how Google’s search works, etc.
We can agree to disagree. I personally do not find any value in people complaining without illuminating the problem they're complaining about, and seeking or proposing a different vision or solution.
The "world's knowledge under you fingertips" motto is still valid and brilliant though. My personal solution is library of OCR-ed PDFs with most established books from various domains, git repository for each domain. Greppable in miliseconds, locally. Hijack this, SEO experts!
Based on your reply to handsomechad, you may think that it's easiest for people to just build one themselves. But there may be a business opportunity in providing a pre-packaged solution for the masses. In the same way that Dropbox provided a tool that was "trivial" to experts, but was difficult for non-experts (see the infamous comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), if you have a tool that is essentially a rival to Google Books for reference texts, that is interesting.
At this point, I have built a set of "sources I trust" and use google as a tool to internally search their websites more than anything else.
site:source.com "search query"
1st page guitar tabs are the most vanilla chord strum patterns. 1st page recipes are some "americanized - SAHM blog" version of the real thing. 1st page news is a sensationalized link to CNN or Fox, that doesn't quote 1st sources. 1st page game reviews are IGN and 1st page movie reviews are Rotten Tomatoes. For anything more niche google results wikihow or quora, when reddit almost certainly has a better answer somewhere.
The 1st page of Google search returns perfectly average results. But, I have stopped expecting any 'perfect' or 'great' results from it.
I'm really itching to start writing my own search engine now.
I personally have been using DuckDuckGo for several years at this point and am quite satisfied with their results and their commitment to privacy. You shouldn't use any Google product if you have any serious measure of concern for your privacy (he hypocritically types while a YouTube video plays in the background - hey, at least I'm not logged in).
Especially when looking for technical things or reviews on practically anything, the top 5 results are garbage sites (with content written or modified by people with names suggesting an SEO "content" factory in a particular region of the world).
That's hardly dismal. That not even mildly inconvenient.
http:// axlk.bebanni50.it/debian-i915.html
http:// bpnq.circoloambientalepiemonte.it/nfsv4-uid-mapping.html
IOW, if it's not on page 1 it's mostly crap (spam).
When was that, exactly? In 1998, when only 3% of the world had access to the web and creating content was limited to a small handful of privileged individuals? This author rails against "Directing the narrative", while building site with a thin sliver of links related to a handful of topics they deem worthy of inclusion. They offer no solutions for an internet that servers 3.5 billion people, choosing instead to whine about how much better the internet was "back in the day."
I don't think Google is blameless, but I think they are more of an inevitable byproduct of this many people coming online than they are a root cause.
We lost that a long time ago.
I just tried it with my own number, and my site comes up with both search engines as well.
Never understood why there are so many of this pages and why you would build one...
There is no bigger turnoff than coming across waves and waves of listicles and "alternatives to" articles that provide no real insight, beyond dumping a bunch of links, adding 1,000 words of nothing, titling it "Ultimate Beginner's Guide to X in 2020" and calling it a day.
Sometimes, to find "actual person" content, I'll add "reddit" to the end of my search query, but that won't be enough, as some enterprising content marketer has decided that they need to rank for those searches too, and created posts like "What reddit thinks about X".
SEO is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that businesses create this kind of low-quality "linkbait" as "inbound marketing", which is getting eyeballs on a page (by whatever means necessary) and upselling their own services. That's why the content feels so soulless.
Would it help your goals to use "site:"?
As soon as links became a signal to search engines, they stopped being an organic expression of page authors.
What's that old saying about metrics? "You get what you measure."
I think we need an alternative search engine based on community vetting.
I.e. you submit your url to the search engine but it isn't present in all search results until a certain number of real people will say it's meaningful and useful. You can do that by only showing it first in 1% of search results and ask people to rate it.
You don't have to index 10 billion websites, you just have to index 1 million of useful websites.
Whatever way Google rates websites has a direct effect on the web itself. In a way they're a victim of their own success.
Wouldn't it make sense to archive the old articles and put no-crawl rule on them? Deleting just seems extreme no matter how you look at it. That being said - content that is controlled by such people is probably not worth keeping.
Wouldn't it be more productive to hire people to write meaningful and interesting content? That way they wouldn't just have visitors tricked to come from Google but also a constant following.
The only reason I see for junk content is lack of imagination.