SEO Is Gentrifying the Internet | Hacker News Reader

SEO Is Gentrifying the Internet

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I'll often find myself in a situation where I'm evaluating two competing products that I don't know much about. For example the other day, it was Logstash vs. Fluentd.

What I've noticed compared to even 5 years ago, is that almost all the Google searches on a topic like that are content marketing. Which isn't wholly bad, at least I'm glad that marketing dollars are being spent on somewhat informative blog content instead of wild parties at trade shows.

But still, I don't really find these content marketing pages terribly informative. They all tend to come off as the same type of bland, inoffensive corporate-y just-the-facts ma'am. "Logstash supports [X]. Fluentd supports [Y]. They're both good in separate ways. By the way our SaaS product [Q] integrates with both."

That's not what I want. I want to know where the bodies are buried. I want to see flame wars, pig-headed opinions, comments saying "lolz, doing that is retarded". Content marketing, in addition to pushing its own agenda, is never going to give you that kind of opinion, because offending people is bad for business. But I want to see honest takes, even if flawed and opinionated.

So all too often with these types of searches, I'll just reflexively append "Fluentd vs. Logstash Reddit" or "Fluentd vs. Logstash HackerNews" because at least I feel like you're likely to get an honest discussion.

Pretty much. Google (and other) Search results have always been full of SEO optimized content made by marketers. It was rarely the best way to find honest opinions and reviews.

15 years ago, I'd search for people's blogs and read them and the comments, 10 years ago eBay and Amazon reviews were good (now Amazon is gamed, and eBay has decoupled feedback from listings for some unfathomable reason), now it's mega forums like Reddit.

I don't actually want to read endless troll threads, but I do want actual opinions from actual people.

I sometimes work around that by adding in a quoted "forum", but they are also going the way of the do-do a bit.

I like to add "shit", "scam" or some other negative term after the product name to find the negative reviews.

> So all too often with these types of searches, I'll just reflexively append "Fluentd vs. Logstash Reddit" or "Fluentd vs. Logstash HackerNews" because at least I feel like you're likely to get an honest discussion.

To search HN I often use https://hn.algolia.com. Compared to a Google search it is clearer how old are the submissions and the order of the result is more predictable (it's the score of the submission)

I do this too all the time and many people in my circle are always concerned that I "Listen too much to reddit". Which is just insane to me! Of course I would rather listen to an open, commentable discussion forum than the top search result which is there because of manifactured relevancy and heavy ad spend.

Scarily whats been happening recently is that the black box turk vogon SEO machine is starting to pump out sites with random urls but that are riddled with the phrase "reddit" in the meta tags / seo texts.

The machine is learning!

I do completely agree 100% with this article, but I don't know that I agree with using "Gentrifying" in this context. I even had to go ask Google what "Gentrifying" means, because I thought maybe it had some alternate meaning I wasn't aware of. I think this article is using "Gentrifying" as a synonym for "ruining" here? That doesn't seem quite right.

I'm really not one to care about semantics usually, but that seems like such a loaded word with a pretty standard definition, and I'm not sure it fits here.

I could see it's equivalent usage as South Park uses it in the whole SodoSopa arc.

I think it’s being used in the sense of quirky, unpolished, local stuff getting replaced by big shiny corporate stuff — drawing a parallel to the mom & pop diner (independent if unreliable blogs) getting driven out by Starbucks (official if slightly soulless websites).

Aha! That does make sense. Though I still feel like it's an odd choice of words, I see what you're meaning is.

SEO content is largely unreliable, as reliable content wins on regular SE pagerank without the O.

Unfortunately sometimes the O is better than reliability (when it comes to pagerank.)

It's not even big shiny corporate stuff: in many cases it's being replaced by junk spun content.

E.g., just this morning I was looking for advice on how to attach kitchen cabinets to drywall (not that I actually have drywall in my kitchen; I was simply curious). The experience, in common with a lot of other DIY related searches I've done recently as I work on the house, was deeply frustrating. The top result was spun to within an inch of its life, and incredibly repetitive and frustrating to read. Worse, the information was misleading to the point of being potentially hazardous if followed.

As GP has observed, the word "ruining" might be better used in place of the word "gentrifying" in this piece.

With Google's recent-ish push towards reputation and big names, it's both: big name corporate junk spun content.

We really need a way to flat out block whole domains from search results. Ad-blockers kinda do that, but only after search engine serves them up...

I know the feeling exactly. I'm trying to find out how many Hue spots to place in my new kitchen's ceiling, and how close together they should be. It's been a SEO nightmare and I still don't have an answer :-(

Our kitchen remodel put a can above every 4-ish feet of counter space and it works well for us. Sloped ceiling with most of the cans about 9-10' off the floor. YMMV.

Thank you!

It's being used loosely to mean "regular folk trying tnliving their simple lives are getting pushed out by moneyed interests, changing a one-person-one-vote culture to a one-dollar-one-vote culture." (Note that in the absence of wealth inequality, these two are equivalent so there's minimal problem with conflating them).

I agree that it seems like the wrong word. "Feudalization" might be a bit closer to what's clearly meant, but still not as close as I'd like. I'm sure the intent is not malicious, but it still seems ironic that OP kind of promises one thing and then delivers another while complaining about that very same thing.

OED (an older edition):

> the process of renovating and improving a house or district so that it conforms to middle-class taste

In this case, it's making the internet conform to Google's taste. Seems to be an appropriate use of the term, even if in the more recent sense we think of it as displacement of people or local businesses.

But is it middle class taste that's being satisfied? Seems more like the aristocracy's taste/interest that's being served here.

Usually conforming the world at large to the middle classes' taste is in the aristocracy's interest. The have-mores can afford their own bubble.

> I think this article is using "Gentrifying" as a synonym for "ruining" here?

It sounds like they mean "gentrifying" in the conventional sense: quirky, cool neighborhood changes so only newly-arrived wealthy people can afford to live there, and the previous residents are forced out. The quirky, cool character leaves with them, and what's left is a bunch of Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Yoga studios, just like everywhere else.

> Alas, such rejoicing was premature. Instead of delivering us a more useful and trustworthy internet, all the “Your Money or Your Life” update did was homogenize the internet even further—and drive many of its most precarious workers into even more dire financial straits. Once-popular sites like Livestrong, whose articles were mainly written by generalist staff writers and freelancers, had to dramatically cull their lineups. A simple story about how to get rid of blackheads—the kind of quick piece that every low level content jockey has written a dozen times—now must bear the name of a Real Live Doctor to have any chance of ranking. That doctor has to have a Googleable work history, preferably an extensive one. Once the article is done, it has to be updated on a regular basis, regardless of whether there’s been a massive breakthrough in anti-blackhead technology. Above all, the article has to be “great content,” in the words of Google. What they mean by this is not exactly clear, though the company has provided 175 pages’ worth of vague hints.

> For the average internet user, this SEO arms race has made the internet both less interesting and less usable. When we want to discover whether blueberries are poisonous for cats, we have to sort through hundreds of words answering irrelevant questions like “what are the health benefits of blueberries” and “can cats eat vegetables.” When we get frustrated and try the next result down, we’re greeted by a story that looks and reads much the same as the one we just abandoned (the standard formula now is LARGE HEADER – a few paragraphs of text and a bulleted list – LARGE HEADER – a few paragraphs of text and a numbered list, ad infinitum). Here’s a quote from a doctor that feels like it was cut-and-pasted from a different interview; there are some citations from scientific studies presented largely bereft of context. Hooray for the illusion of clarity. Hooray for the death of creativity.

"Gentrifying" was used to stoke images of class warfare and racial divides. They used the term to get you angry. Using that word is nothing short of propaganda.

So pretty much like your use of the term "propaganda"?

I actually agree with the use of the word "Gentrifying" here. The way I understood it, the author is implying that the internet land grab is being gentrified in the same way that many neighborhoods have been. The rich roll-in on land that was once considered worthless and take-over, displacing the original inhabitants, generally the poor.

Now In the context of SEO, when the web first started, the big scary corporations that had tens of thousands or even millions of dollars a month to spend on site optimization, only focused on specific areas of the internet. Insurance, Lawyers, general e-commerce, etc. There was a war for attention and land value in these sectors of the internet, and SEO were the soldiers of that war. But for the most part, that war stayed "over there". People that wanted to share recipes, hackers that wanted to share code snippets, families that wanted to share photos, and sites dedicated to niche hobbies all continued to live in the original frontier of the internet. Largely free and uncorrupted by the big corporations.

While SEO was competitive in main industries like law, insurance, travel, etc, it was still very easy for an enthusiast to throw up a informative website for fun in a niche of the internet and gain traction organically. They didn't need to dedicate funds towards SEO.

But over time, the "corporations" have now encroached nearly every corner of the internet. If you want to rank on a search engine for a website you made this weekend to share a fun idea to other people that might be interested, you really can't do it without leveraging one of the many platforms (ie Hackernews, Reddit, Medium, Pinterest, Facebook, eBay, Thingiverse, etc) which subsequently own your content and use it to further spread the gap between the corporations and "everyone else". This is like rich property developers that roll into a community to tear down old houses and then subsequently rent back apartments to the very people they robbed of their land.

I think there is a serious gentrification that is going on here. The only people that might not see it are those of you that are too young to remember the original internet. The original internet was magical. You could have an interest in HAM radios and build a website for fun that could gain SEO traction organically and be discovered simply because it was good and valuable content. That rarely happens anymore. There are very few, if any, corners of the internet that are that "free" anymore. Now, if you are seriously interested in sharing knowledge you either need to turn to the platforms or you need to turn your simple hobby into a sprawling business so you can dedicate funds to competing against the big guys.

Note: I use the term "corporations" here very broadly. But the truth is that 95%+ of the people reading this blog make their sole income thanks to these "evil/scary/bad corporations", so take it in stride. I am just demonstrating the idea of gentrification, which requires separating the "haves" from the "have-nots". But it isn't necessarily good or bad to be on either side of that battle. I think everyone reading this has feet on both sides of the war.

I agree with you on this. Read the article and though Gentrifying isn't the right word to explain what the author is referencing.

But on the other hand I was click-baited into clicking specifically because of the title so it definitely drove my curiosity.

Probably getting this under a more appropriate title would result in fewer clicks.

They use the word 'homogenized' later in the article, and that's the right adjective.

The English internet is pretty bad. If, like me, you have the superpower of another language, which is spoken by a few millions so that enough websites exists in it, yet it is such a minuscule market compared to the popular languages you get to enjoy some of the remains of the older internet where search engines weren’t gamed as aggressively.

Though I’m sure things will get worse for these languages as well.

In a way, any ranking of value invites people to attack it constantly. The harder it is to attack it, the more value one gets from succeeding. Until the market incentives changes (and how could they? I would love to know), things will stay as bad as they are or worsen.

There is also the fact that NLP barely focuses on languages besides English. Even popular languages like French are largely ignored.

Yeah, there's some really good content on Russian and Chinese forums, for example. You don't even need a superpower, just do what Tony Stark did and use technology :D

It's also fun seeing web technologies that have fallen out of favour in the West for years (decades, even!) still being used on active websites.

Delete this comment to further delay that unwanted change. Youre showing the world an untapped market opportunity! ;-)

> The acronym SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” which translates into the vernacular as “tricks marketers use to make certain articles appear at the top of Google’s search results.

When I found Altavista it was a game changer. Used correctly, not apt for casual users, you could find everything. And the internet was mostly content. No stores, no astroturfing, no blog pages with random words.

There were many wrong things on the internet at that time. But, SEO-fueled empty-of-content auto-generated pages was not one of them.

> For the average internet user, this SEO arms race has made the internet both less interesting and less usable.

I am not an average user. But, the internet is getting also worse for me. And I see similar complaints here in HN.

I wonder if the solution is a human curated Index. Rather than scanning as much of the internet as possible, manually add domains based on perceived value and usefulness in search results. Personally I'd be happy to use a search without including Livestrong, Pinterest, and USA Today in it's results.

They'll just corrupt the gatekeeper. The incentives are too strong.

We saw that with DMOZ, which sounds cool at first, until you realize that many categories had an administrator/curator who happened to have a web site in that space.

And somehow he wasn't interested in having other good web sites listed.

I've experienced that multiple times when I submitted topical web sites (that were not my own).

That's a shame. I was hoping there was a space for a programming-only search engine. I'm getting tired of searching for things like "C# ?." and getting the most basic of results about C# itself, Udemy courses, and news about programming.

Federation goes a long way towards solving this. In a federated model there's no single gatekeeper, just a bunch of curators providing links that are indexed according to a shared taxonomy/ontology. You choose what curators to trust.

I'm not overly optimistic about federation. I don't think there's much money in it and who will develop a mass market solution if they're not going to make money out of it?

That was DMOZ.

> I wonder if the solution is a human curated Index.

Yes, for people who are willing to pay a lot that’s the solution. There’s a reason that professionals in law, etc., pay for and use reference tools that combine search features with human curation/annotation.

But quality human curation/annotation doesn’t scale cheaply to a growing corpus or number of axes of annotation, its at least linear (possibly superlinear, because of supply constraints on quality labor) cost in each.

I dunno, I remember lots of white-on-white text keyword stuffing back then.

I reckon there's a surprisingly simple solution: build a search engine that penalises pages containing adverts. If a page is heavily manipulating SEO to get your attention, you can bet it is loaded with adverts. If you built an anti-advert search engine you'd be competing with pretty much no-one, because all the search startups are chasing their cut of the multi-billion dollar advertising market and/or buying in SEO-infected results from one of the big existing search engines. The difficulty of course would be finding an alternate funding model that could scale, because building a search engine isn't cheap or easy.

Simple, but incredibly hard to do.

Sounds like a good way to get tons of websites with covertly sponsored content eg. affiliate links or paid/shill reviews.

Apart from HN, which sites would that engine crawl?

Every other site on the net seems to sell you something.

Would you allow Wikipedia even though it tries to make you donate via those popup-like dialogs that slide in from the top?

Why would you even want to search all the sites that are trying to sell you something when you're simply looking for some information? Putting it in pre-internet terms, it'd be like walking down the high street looking at shop windows to try to answer a question rather than going into a library to look it up in a book. Wikipedia isn't trying to sell you something - with the high street vs library analogy its more like a book than a shop.

> Why would you even want to search all the sites that are trying to sell you something when you're simply looking for some information?

Answering the question online is a means to an end. The 'answer' is the top of a marketing funnel that's designed to make you familiar with the answerer's product/service and sign up, or post a link to their article on your Twitter.

Look at it the other way around. If you were a cat owner, how much of your free time would you spend answering questions about their dietary restrictions?

So you fixed this problem with your simple solution. Now you've created another one: how do you make sure the people who write content can do so while putting bread on the table.

I'm sure there would still be plenty of advertising based search engines for them to advertise their content in. See also the high street vs library analogy - if you had great public libraries you wouldn't be putting shopkeepers out of business.

A classic dilemma. Collegial vs commercial ecosystems. Amateur sports face this. You can't really make a living running ultra marathons, which makes it somewhat exclusive, but if there was a lot of money to be made the whole experience would change and not always for the better.

Is it really a problem though? Was there a lack of content in the times before the commercial Internet (or the Internet itself really.. in the time of BBSes)?

And there are things like Patreon as well..

Yes. That’s why piracy was a big draw for BBSes.

Short of an AI that can extract actual meaning and become an actual expert on a subject in its own right, I think this will always be an arms race between SEO techniques and Google scoring algorithms. The lead will change constantly. After all, even humans are routinely fooled by slick-talking con men. Even fairly smart ones, hoodwinked by the promises made for some new bit of software technology and only realizing much later that it doesn't really serve their needs that well. Come to think of it, even an AI such as I just mentioned might be nothing more than another con.

Being able to extract meaning will mean nothing if the source material manipulates the reader.

The article accurately paints a picture of the problems with SEO. But then it makes an odd jump and blames Google for it, and seems to suggest legal action be taken against Google to force it to do better.

That's... weird.

Creating an algorithm, that searches the entirety of the web to find the answers to your questions is not easy. But I honestly believe that this is one thing Google is trying its hardest to do. They want to serve the best possible answers. And they're in a battle against an army of content creators who want to game the system.

What's especially weird about the article's anti-Google conclusion is that they acknowledge that it's a game of whack-a-mole. Google improves the algorithm. SEO writers find a way to game it. Google improves again. Etc.

What, exactly, would they like Google to do differently?

There's a lot of reasons to criticize Google. But I don't think the search engine itself is one of them. If anyone could do better, they would be by now.

This, exactly.

Google's primary motivation is that the searcher gets the "best" answer with as few clicks as possible. They've gone so far as to penalize advertisers that are paying THEM if they're not seen as the best answer using all those metrics that Google harvests. If people seem to stop searching after they've hit a Youtube video or Wiki then Google considers those were the satisfactory answers. If an advertiser tends to be the end of a search a lot that advertiser becomes Google's favorite search result for that term.

The SEO guys' favorite tactic any more are shady paid links to their content from other sites. That's Google's 2nd best signal that you're good content, always has been, but it gets less valid every year and they know it. They give much less credibility for external links to your site than they used to. SEO guys killed their own golden goose by overusing that.

How do I know all this? I'm tasked with managing a small company's Google ads, and I've worked on various small organizations' websites (purely white-hat SEO tactics) since the web was young. I despise Internet ads. I've come to respect Google's approach to them. You really have to earn your relevancy score, and even if you're willing to pay a LOT for your ads you struggle if they consider you a "bad" answer for the chosen search terms. My current employer insists on bidding on several overly-generic and/or branded keywords and he pays through the nose for them. I applaud Google for sticking that to him so hard.

I agree that SEO has made it harder and harder to find good content on the internet.

I don't agree with Google being blamed for this. They're trying desperately to fix the problem. Maybe they're not as effective as you'd hope, but why would a "multipolar" search world be better? Wouldn't all search engines be plagued with people trying to game the system?

Yeah, they're trying to combat it, but they also fill your screen with ads, which aren't any better than the "SEO optimized" trash on the first page.

Half a screen of shit, either way. The difference is in who makes the money from it. And it's not the user.

Google's dominance creates a monoculture, so that any weakness in their ranking is immediately exploited by SEO folks. If there were multiple real search engines using different ranking algos, it would be harder to game them all at once, which would shift the balance somewhat towards just making good content.

Even with multiple search engines, if they are all trying to solve the same problem, you'll get convergent evolution.

Let's say you have 10 search engines each with their own algorithm. 1 of them has an exploitable weakness. Either they close this weakness by switching to one of the superior algorithms or they get exploited and become much less useable than their competitors. In either case, you soon have 9 search algorithms. Repeat this process a few times and you're back to a monoculture. Best case scenario, you reach a stable equilibrium where a few different search engines are all plagued by different but roughly equivalent issues, such that none is good enough to beat out the others.

Google is the source of the problem: If they didn't rank search results and aggregate "eyeballs" there would be nothing to optimize.

If you don't want ranked results, you can always type random strings into the url bar.

> Wouldn't all search engines be plagued with people trying to game the system?

Remember that a big selling point for Mac computers is that "they don't get viruses". Since that's not true, it's taken to mean that the number of viruses targeting MacOS is minuscule compared to Windows OS.

An alternative search engine that doesn't play favourites (AMP, Youtube results) and isn't predicated on selling ads could definitely do better in answering queries in specific niches.

I was searching "how to get a bipartite mapping from adjacency matrix" and it was showing how to get the matrix from the mapping. Exactly the other way around! With all the language models and BERT's they've been using lately, this happens often, it gets confused.

Google is in a bad moment now. Attention moved from desktop to mobile and social networks. So Google needs to position itself well in the future. The new search interface is voice and dialogue, we have seen neural nets do amazing demos, but Google Search seems to be going worse by the year. Where's the promised magic?

So I googled "can cats eat blueberries" and I see the Purina rich snippet which is my first hint that "yes".

Then I scroll down the page and see multiple other sources confirming this.

So I leave and have my answer without ever having clicked into one of these sites.

Regardless of whether that is beneficial to the publisher, I, as the user, should be thrilled. I don't understand this person's issue. The results for that query appear to be pretty conclusive and all I have to do to see that is look at the descriptions of the results.

You don't understand the writer's issue that the top-ranked 'answer' is from a company that has recalled its own pet food products multiple times?

A friend had an idea about using some kind if strong mechanism of identity for combating spam, seo, information warfare, etc.

All of those rely on the low cost of pretending to be unique and something else than the actuality combined with massive automation.

However, ultimately (at least for now) everything is done by one of us 7.8 billion and each of us has a limited capacity for original content.

Assume that content could be linked to identities and there were sufficiently strong guarantees that fake identities are not being mass manufactured by bot nets etc.

Then something akin to a web of trust or credibility rankings could be established.

Of course, the theory and the implementation of the identity mechanism would have to be strong, decentraliced and ridiculously easy to use and verify.

Otherwise it would be abused in all possible ways simply due to being a high value target (or it wouldn’t gain momentum).

Options for pseudonyms and anonymous publishing could be necessary to gain momentum and wide acceptance. Also recovering from identity theft would have to be possible.

Crap SEO content has been blighting the web for years now, of course, but I seem to remember it being worse in ~2008-10 with content farms like eHow and Mahalo spewing forth their garbage content in order to (successfully, for a time) game Google.

Don't forget the font of wisdom that was Yahoo Answers.

When content ranking is done algorithmically, the inevitable consequence is that you have people that game the system. I don't have a solid idea on what a sustainable alternative would be, but I believe that we need to move to a search engine which is human-curated. Maybe an implementation is a search engine where you can whitelist sites. That, in combination with crowdsourced lists of sites or content could be one solution.

Google crawl was originally "seeded" by starting with the human curated DMOZ directory. Eventually they stop doing that and have gone fully non-human.

I agree with the main idea of the article. Google setup the rules and the legions of clever SEO consultants fly 747s through the loopholes. Google closes them, SEOs pivot, and the tit-for-tat goes on.

Meanwhile legitimate businesses suffer.

Meanwhile users suffer.

Google has one view on the world of content -- namely "one big index to rule them all" and "remove humans at every step of the way"

This has made the behemoth blind to their next existential threat -- the real threat to their search dominance will not come from Bing, or Baidu, or another other big-ish play.

The threat is on the bottom. In the niches. In curation.

Curation from enthusiasts and subject matter experts who will run their own micro search engines.

Just as we look at "influencers" for what software to run, makeup to buy, and books to read -- I think one day we might like to use Paul G's search engine on startups and entrepreneurship.

Or perhaps a hyper-local search engine run by a consortium of small business owners and civic-minded people?

Interestingly, DuckDuckGo did not have this problem. I got multiple different sources all saying "cats can eat blueberries".

As someone who cooks a lot, recipes are the worst. As the author points out, it is the obviousness of what the recipe writers are doing that makes it so annoying. I have to acknowledge that I am at least somewhat to blame for this (albeit miniscule in the scale of things) as instead of seeking out concise recipe sites I opt to google in the first place.

Not only that, but the recipes themselves are often poor quality. A few years ago, I was looking for recipes for banketstaaf, a Dutch almond pastry usually made around Christmas. I found half a dozen copies of the exact same recipe. Sometimes with unit differences or scaling everything up/down, but the exact same recipe. And that recipe didn't even work, as it resulted in an extremely runny filling.

It ended up taking half a dozen attempts to vary the recipe before I got it right, but it was rather frustrating at the start.

Why don't you just buy a recipe book? You said so yourself that you know exactly what these sites are doing. They won't give you a concise recipe because it goes against their incentives.

Usually I'm looking for something specific and question whether books will be much help. Eg., I have some salsa, sausage and lentils what can I turn them into type searches.

Reddit is one of the last bastions where I can find original thought from real people on certain topics, like reviewing products.

The are still other forums. Google promoted my forums (in Dutch) in their results a lot this year, while I did nothing to improve "SEO".

That's only possible because Reddit is not a blog, more like a message board so it's incredibly easy to distinguish between a content marketer/astroturfer or a genuine user.

This too will change. As search results get gamed even further, either users will move to restrict their searches to specific domains, or Google will favour Reddit's results more and more. At some point, the astroturfing will move there. There is already a pretty good business in selling high-karma reddit accounts as their content tends to get more visibility on the site.

I don't typically trust an article that breaks complex issues into blaming ONE thing. However, this one does have some really useful historical information in it and is worth a read.

My issue with the "this is a problem because of this one thing thinking" is that we then solve for that one thing, thinking. HEY THIS WILL FIX IT, and then someone else comes and games the system after we've changed it.

This is such a complex issue, the article addresses some but not all of the issues. One is that the quality of your search is dependent on using the right keywords. Not many google users think about it like that. We think about search as if we're talking to a person, and search isn't quite there yet. The article is expecting Google to translate "can eat" to "poisonous". I swapped the word and boom.

https://pets.thenest.com/blueberries-safe-cats-8730.html

First paragraph, easy to read and understand, I didn't go any further down.

The problem is that searching by a sentence and extracting the intent of the user when using language is F-ing hard. Then you want to build something that isn't gameable with optimizations you didn't intend and when you find them you need to fix them without degrading the quality of your product.

I also want to point out that this user wants a diversity of ideas to appear on Google, while there is active pressure to sensor people who do not have the authority to speak on certain topics, or who are quoting these mom and pop blogs.

If we compare this to the real world, and take restaurants/stores. There's a McDonalds(lowes, walmart, etc) every 10 feet, but if you dive deeper you'll find the locally owned restaurant on the corner that is delicious. Can we use law to fix these issues? Yeah, we can make McDonalds every 100 miles, every 20 miles, tax them, etc. What are the side effects of our fixes and will the outcome be less desirable? I did a fair amount of driving across the country in my younger days, and what I can tell you about McDonalds is it's never amazing, but it's also never awful. I've eaten at some awful small town restaurants and I've also had some great ones.

On top of that, now I've got a kid who's got an allergy, I can tell you exactly what he can have at any fast food chain because they have an allergen menu. Not all restaurants know that information.

My personal pet peeve is vendors using content marketing to write shallow pseudo-technical content designed to rank for converting keywords.

It's the kind of shit that forces me to search stackoverflow, reddit, hn or any other somewhat curated source I can find.

> any other somewhat curated source

To me this is the nub of the problem - Google is doing fine for an automated solution. But you cannot beat a community of enthusiasts who know their area and come together to build a public resource.

Its almost like humans have been doing this for generations previously to the internet.

Somethings just are going to not scale

I feel I agree with you but a few years ago it wasn't like this: I remember being able to use google for discovery and I can't anymore.

Google game of whack-a-mole somehow turned against them and this article is spot on on that.

this is a good point - probably related to majority audience need - one would not expect prime time TV to deliver discovery in the same way the library of congress would - perhaps we don't need competitors to google to make google better but competitors to make google many different things - they should not have one algorithm as it were.

I love how he complains the entire article about how googles’ search results are terrible and ends with a call to action to regulate google but never actually looked at any other search engine.

The author presents an extremely incomplete picture of modern SEO. As an SEO professional for the last decade, I think we can do better in a discussion of the shortcomings of SEO.

The whole article presents SEOs in a similar way to how people talk about 'used car salesmen'; we all know the clichés about used car salesmen, but the reality for any professional selling used car is vastly different. Presenting SEOs as 'the world’s most scruple-free douchebags' is fairly insulting and not productive.

His article discusses _some_ SEO tactics used by _some_ SEO practitioners. For the subset he presents, then I certainly agree there are a lot of issues, but he presents it as the complete picture.

# Modern SEO

Modern SEO is made up of many facets, one part of which is content, but which also includes technical considerations around crawling and indexing of content, as well as advocating for site speed optimisations, and improving user experience and signals.

A reputable SEO practitioner should be asking 'does this deserve to rank?', and should be advocating improvements that have longevity (i.e. will be helping next year, not just next week). I spent 9 years in an SEO agency, where these were central and core to our whole approach.

# Blackhat SEO

Yes, there is a lot of manipulative and shady stuff going down. That is not just content focused, as the author discusses, but there is also a lot of link buying and selling, which is design to manipulate the link graph with the aim of gaming PageRank essentially.

There is no denying that this stuff happens, but it is once again the same as the used car salesman analogy -- the majority of modern SEOs are professionals, and they don't deserve to be tarred with the same brush.

The line is, I accept, not as clear cut with SEO and there are people who practice manipulative tactics who operate in a grey area, and present themselves as the 'proper' solution.

# Google

Obviously, people practicing manipulative SEO are to blame for their own actions, and for making the situation worse. However, another aspect is Google's monopoly. I don't see how Google could have done a lot better at preventing some of the shady SEO practices that go down - they actively try.

However, their _monopoly_ is problematic as it means that there is only one black box to optimise against, and no real SEO consideration needs to be paid to other search engines.

It will be interesting to see what happens if Apple enter the fray, and what the knock on effects are.

I'm in SEO as well, and IMO the writer is simply describing what SEO means to the average person.

IRL no one not in the industry cares about the real work of SEOs from a technical and accessibility standpoint; they boil it down to the most visible manifestation of it, which is low-quality content marketing written by passionless freelancers that aren't domain experts and don't encourage any kind of trust.

It's wild to me that there are hundreds of web pages titled "Can cats eat blueberries?" and you find a similar thing if you replace blueberries with: strawberries, bananas, oranges, lettuce, cranberries, green beans, crackers, carrots, flies, bees, and on and on

It is wild but makes sense. They’re trying to capture that sweet, sweet long-tail web traffic. Which you might think is cool because it’s a system where people are incentivized to answer even the most specific of questions. But then you read the content and realize a lot of these content marketing sites often provide terrible answers.

The thing is there probably never really was a good answer for that question there anyhow.

It's not like in the 'good ole' days of Lycos' there was information a plenty' - there was hardly anything there.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's not going to be 'whatever it was in 2002'.

Two political side-jabs (cross promotion) in an SEO article? No thanks.

Here's a list of things you won't find in this article:

* A description of what SEO actually is

* Any mention of how SEO came to exist

* Even a hint that figuring out which search result to return might be hard to do, or that the process might be game-able

If I only read this article, I would be pretty justified in walking away from it wondering why search engines or the government don't just "ban SEO" and call it a day.

When you get past the cats eating blueberries and anal beads parts, the article is mostly a high level recount of the ways SEO has evolved over time and how Google has made changes to its search algorithm to fight spammy websites. The author then concludes that there is still hope, because the EU has fined Google a few times. What?

The second paragraph starts with:

> The acronym SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” which translates into the vernacular as “tricks marketers use to make certain articles appear at the top of Google’s search results.”

That's the description you're looking for; the "why" is fairly self-explanatory from the description. Anyone looking for more information on the term and its history can presumably Google the term.

Your comment is taking nit picking to a high art. Are you an SEO?

"When you get past the cats eating blueberries and anal beads parts, the article is mostly a high level recount of the ways SEO has evolved over time and how Google has made changes to its search algorithm to fight spammy websites. The author then concludes that there is still hope, because the EU has fined Google a few times. What?" So the article does in fact explain SEO? But you disagree with the ideas on corporate power?

The author assumes that the reader has some familiarity with the term SEO. Even if they did not describe it well enough, it is not out of malice. If the reader does know what SEO is then the author is stating their point very clearly, unlike the SEO-gamed articles that the author is railing against.

The issue is that the author expects to ask Google whether his or her cat can eat blueberries and expects and instant, accurate answer, free of charge.

That isn't free. It takes someone writing something about whether cats can eat blueberries, and then it takes a search engine having the incentives to index that content and point you to it. All this to answer what is, in the end, an extraordinarily trivial question that is of no consequence to anyone.

All told, it's quite amazing that Google and the gusher of cash that its advertising produces has led to the provision of a service that people regularly consult for extraordinarily specific yet silly questions such as "can a cat eat blueberries." It's even more amazing that there are farms of people spending time to produce content to provide to this search engine. Yet all the author can think to do is complain that she gets a crappy answer to a silly question.

The alternative to free, crappy answers to silly questions is not an amazing, perfect answer to silly questions. The author seems to think such answers once existed. They never did. Before Google you would get nothing but nonsense in response to a query like this. There isn't some vet clinic somewhere that crafts answers to this. There isn't some university professor doing it. There is no government doing it. This isn't like vital government data that taxes pay to produce, or commercially valuable information that someone will produce and post. This is the kind of content that is junk and that exists at all only because it's worthwhile for someone to create mounds of this crap and have Google index it so they can post ads.

Google or its successor will likely improve over time--that is, they'll get better at creating incentives for the creation of low-value content like this so that people can ask their phones silly questions like this and get answers that are, perhaps, better than nothing. (Perhaps the answers are worse than nothing! In that case, stop looking for them! I never cared when my cat ate blueberries.) But Google did not somehow make the Internet worse. Google led to the creation of stuff that wasn't there at all before. That's a positive, not a net negative.

Vet clinics do in fact have that info and I'm sure some post it online. I've seen posters on the walls with common things dogs and cats can't eat (something about grapes for example, forgot who can't eat them though).

This is not a silly question and having no results is infinitely better than having results with no content. This will become orders of magnitude worse when SEO-tards hook up something like GPT3 to generate gigabytes of nonsense based on current google trends. Search for whether quabbles quibble or qwobble today and find nothing. Search tomorrow and find generated essays that also sell ukranian mail order wives or something.

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