It’s not exactly their fault for noticing a valuable problem and solving it though. Google is the reason the incentive exists in the first place, no?
Something seems to have changed since that time though. I don’t think it’s Ahrefs because there were similar services long before them. Did Google lose their way and stop trying to quantify a human experience? I had my concerns back then when they introduced the concept of a canonical URL for duplicate content, something that’s implemented in a way to only be useful for a bot and not a person. But I’ve been too distant to these things to know if it was an isolated example or the beginning of a trend. Did the cat and mouse game of improving usability come to a plateau and now we’re in the inevitable end game of exploiting edge cases and 2% improvements? Is this what should have been the completely predictable state we’d end up given the alignment of incentives? Search results that are _just_ good enough so that you don’t abandon Google, but not so good that you click a result instead of an ad.
I don’t know what the cause is, or if it’s even just one thing. But it definitely feels like it’s been getting progressively worse for a long time and that the rate of decline has been accelerating.
To that end I’ve personally switched to Kagi. It’s at least ticked the “just good enough” box for me for a few months, which is something that never stuck with DDG. And so I fronted the cash for an annual subscription incase the incentive system with Google was part of the problem. I figure me moaning about it while still active using it means I’m complicit in being part of the problem too. And so I should vote with both my feet and dollars in support of any team that’s actually trying to fix things.
At the article level, it is indeed mostly harmless, except when they catch some Google bias such as removing dates and edit notices from blog posts (because evergreen articles supposedly rank better), force a certain word count, H1/H2 count and paragraph size (which is why you get a life story before a recipe), or when it teaches you to disguise keyword stuffing and you get articles with semi-nonsensical paragraphs that can rank high. This is mostly annoying, though.
But IMO the biggest problem is SEO at a strategic level, which is what's done with the help of tools like Moz and Ahrefs. Websites often hire content agencies to make a large number of low-quality articles targeting popular searches that don't show too many results yet. Basically "balancing" demand/supply. But this practice puts non-SEO-optimized results at the bottom and replaces them with low-quality articles written by freelancers. This forces non-commercial publishers into bigger websites (like StackOverflow, Quora or Reddit). It also causes a lot of duplicate content, since those content agencies uses existing content from results as the basis for their own articles, only SEO optimized. The articles are of course rewritten so it's not word-by-word plagiarism. They also help evading Google measures to fix results. The latest trend when I was still in the industry was having unrelated companies helping each other do inorganic link-building by putting random links in more popular websites also controlled by those agencies, but that's probably old stuff by now.
The biggest problem was feeling like a bad human and not wanting to tell my friends about how I made money on my side hustle. I am really glad I sold those sites and left SEO behind.
My side hustle now is writing FOSS.
1. Think of some product niche: say, best dog toys.
2. Google it.
3. Click on the top 5 search results.
4. Now, judge for yourself: Are these good quality links which look like they were written by a smart human who simply bought a bunch of dog toys and tested them, and is speaking from their personal experience? OR, are the search results gamified to hell, and clearly not something any normal person would think to write by themselves?
I think it's clear in 2022: you have to write in an artificial style and make a lot of unintuitive choices to rank on Google, which is to say, to have anyone online be aware of and using your website. You also have to compete against giant incumbents now who will crush you if you don't come educated and ready to rank against them. So you no choice but to learn SEO techniques, really.
Note: I'm not an SEO guy, I make $0 off SEO. I'm an independent developer who's concluded, if I want to make any money off my own websites, I can learn SEO or I can be poor. And I don't enjoy being poor. So there's not really much of a choice imho, at this point in the timeline.
Another one for products is having the same category named with 2000 related titles so it shows up for the exact search terms someone is searching even if they aren’t quite accurate to the category.
Why not? And they didn't solve the problem, they exploited the problem.