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Comment by WaitWaitWha | Hacker News Reader

Does Google really want to achieve their stated mission?

I would like to see Search Engine Optimization ended with extreme prejudice.

No search engines are immune, but Goog is the epitome of of SEO taking over the first few pages, destroying the "information" that they want to make "universally accessible and useful".

I am also seeing search results where the first few pages are all auto-generated articles, SEO optimized. The content is gibberish, incomprehensible word salad. But, it is long enough, linked enough, and my keyword and synonyms appear sufficiently enough to show up in my search.

Google Reader dying was a sad day indeed. So was usenet dying was a sad day. So was the town square post board, and before that the town crier.

These are not blocking Goog to achieve their stated mission. It is stating such mission, but not doing anything to achieve it.

Talk is cheap.

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How is it possible to get rid of SEO? Search engines have to have some mechanism to determine order, and websites will get more clicks if they are at the top… those two things together will guarantee that sites care about optimizing their appearance in search results.

How would you stop that?

I would have thought a Bayesian machine would be able to filter out sites that looked too much like autogenerated word salad.

Or just exclude all basic pages (e.g. recipe) that insist on having a table of contents.

I know that when I'm searching for answers and the page has a TOC, 9/10 I close it out.

I hate it when pages DON'T have a toc. I wanna see the headings with links so I can jump to the part of the page I care about. Not scroll through hoping to find it...

The height of the HN middlebrow dismissal.

Just do some Bayesian filtering, SEO solved. Can't believe those idiots at Google never thought of it.

Do you seriously think spam filtering is this easy? Just one bayesian machine away from solved?

I do a search for "how to barbaz a foo" on google.

I get the following domains as the top 5 results:

  1. allaboutfoo.com
  2. fooexperts.com
  3. infoonfoo.com
  4. foonation.com
  5. thefooblog.com

The linked pages above all have

  1. A table of contents section
  2. About 30mb of AI, autogenerated filler ("Why should you foo?", "How does foo affect your dog?", "Can you foo a foo?", "Why you should foo twice a day?")
  3. The same content plagiarized from each other's sites, just slightly reformatted/edited
  4. NO ACTUAL INFORMATION ON HOW TO BARBAZ THE FOO

It's 2022, and there's still no way to filter this garbage out?

I'm sure there is, but there is an enormous corpus of data, and any filtering you add can end up impacting the legitimate sites you're trying to get to.

SEO spam is constantly adapting to changes in filtering. If you start filtering sites that have a table of contents, SEO spam will remove their ToC in no time, but authentic blog poster will probably not.

Real content producers don't have the time to chase every change to google's algorithm but SEO spammers do. How do you filter out the spammers who adapt to changes without affecting the real content producers who can't afford it?

I promise you, the problem is harder than you realize. And sure as shit a lot harder than "just add a bayesian filter and these 3 hard coded rules I just came up with"

Anecdotal note on SEO.

I used to be really big into SEO. I used to do things all the time by the book. I worked to get really good inbound links, worked to find great directories to link from, and was really into "white hat" SEO.

Fast forward a few years into the late aughts. Had a client who needed a site in less than two months. Some 15 pages of content, design, CMS and a new logo to boot. Was going to pay me a lot if I could do it.

I got it done and was sweating bullets because I had essentially copied all the content on his site from other sites in the same industry. I essentially aggregated all of the big players content into his site. I was petrified the site would get ranked and yanked and I'd spend months trying to get the site back into the SERPS.

Guess what happened?

Within a month, the site was outranking all the bigger companies in his industry. The site was one page 1 of Google in less than 60 days. All the companies he was competing with were at the bottom of page 1 or pushed to page 2. It never dropped lower than #3 on the first page in Google. The site broke nearly every cardinal rule of SEO - duplicate content, keyword stuffing, fake inbound links, etc. and still managed to be on the front page of Google for a host of long tail search terms and has continued to stay on the front page.

It just confirmed Google doesn't care about enforcing any of its rules any more. If I did what I did, I can only imagine what other people are doing to push their site into the top of the rankings.

Right. In all likelihood, the only way to do this is to make editorial choices: decide that some review sites are better than others, and start penalizing highly optimized garbage by its domain alone in a transparent manner.

I would use a search engine like this, but I understand why an existing trillion dollar multinational basically can't do this.

On the other hand, I do a lot of cooking, and recipe sites are forced to have these absurd winding narratives to appease the SEO gods. Nobody likes this and it really ought to be a solvable problem.

> Does Google really want to achieve their stated mission?

Consider what happened to "Don't be evil".

> I would like to see Search Engine Optimization ended with extreme prejudice.

> destroying the "information" that they want to make "universally accessible and useful".

> Google Reader dying was a sad day indeed. So was usenet dying was a sad day. So was the town square post board, and before that the town crier.

See also what happened to Rap Genius.

> Talk is cheap.

But so persuasive and effective, something that is best controlled if one is in certain lines of work.

I'm quite happy with the results of you.com (not affiliated in any way, just a happy user).

I just hope that DDG are first to solve this SEO problem

They can't, its just a UI for Bing. If you want something actually independent, use Brave Search.

Usenet isn't dead.

Where/how do you read it? I would like to go back to it.

It is interesting, most of the SEO nonsense is not because of Google, they say words to the effect of 'put the customer first and write for them' in their docs and that makes sense. Analytics will pick up content not keyword stuffed bulls4it for robots.

Just for the lols, put together a site with content, submit it to Google and see how many clicks you get. Nobody is going to beat a path to your door, even if you are selling 100% pure gold blocks for tuppence a kilo.

I could go on AWS and build a website in minutes from a CMS but in practice, even if you know you can do that, it actually takes a really long time to build and test a website. Even if you are not being held back by dysfuntional teamwork and can just do it all yourself, in your skill level, it will still take a while before that new website is actually working.

Even simple things like email. It probably just works fine out the box. But if you then decide you want a proper mail server, thinking how hard can it be?, then you will go down a rabbit hole. All you want to do is be able to communicate with people but you have to learn a mountain of stuff that you would not need to know if you just went with Squarespace.

Google have also been very bad at semantic elements. If you mark up your docs in divs and spans then that is fine as far as Google is concerned. It is what it looks like, not what it is. You would think they would like documents that use the more meaningful elements such as article, section, aside and so forth, but no.

Because of this we have search engines reverse engineering the structure and content of pages using mystery AI. Nobody is encouraged to do the equivalent of using 'styles' in Word and they are doing the equivalent of using Word as a typewriter, manually bolding headings rather than using a heading style.

We could have an army of highly literate SEO people essentially editing content to make it better for the customer, better organised with sensible HTML elements and with better English (or other language).

But instead we have an army of people who think that repeating words on a page will bump you up the search rankings, which is at the opportunity cost of not writing better content.

WYSIWYG editors are also evil, based on an outdated metaphor. They don't enable you to logically group your content with sections that start with a heading for the screen reader, the section scoping the relevance of the heading.

We all have a love hate relationship with Google, but, if you look at it objectively, they are not really taking the web in the direction Tim Berners Lee had in mind at that content level.

I have found that the few blogs that I do read now are like discovering the old web, but it is something you have to consciously remember to do. Google Reader and RSS really was the magic ticket for making it work, not to mention web rings...

The thing is that there was never any pressure to get RSS working. In a typical agency a decade ago there would be a grand effort to put these social network shares on everything to drive traffic but the people calling the shots on that never really got RSS and never made developers get that working nicely. It was not in the project spec but the silly Facebook/Pinterest/Tweet links had to be done.

Hence the demise is not just on Google, it is with the snake oil cargo cult SEO belief system that has no idea what the Google algorithm is, but they think they can second guess it better than any developer.

If you can't do then teach. If you can't teach then teach Geography. This was once a popular saying. Don't judge.

The modern take: if you can't code then do website design. If you can't do website design then do SEO.

A SEO person has the time to look at various Google dashboards and to make recommendations. For example, your TTFB is a bit high, can we have that lower? The programming team can then say 'what do you think we have been working on for the last six months?'.

Given where we have come, I would like to see a future where everyone hosts their own stuff. By default your home wifi is a server load balancer with sufficient oomph to hold anything you want to share. Out the box you just put in your URL and there you go. No need for AWS or others, your ISP puts your stuff on a CDN with your permissions. A soveriegn web.

> Nobody is encouraged to do the equivalent of using 'styles' in Word

The main search engines support schema.org for marking up the "semantic" data associated with a webpage. Typically, this triggers "rich" search results. It goes underused because most commercial web sites don't want to make their semantics so transparent to outsiders, they would rather try to get increased traffic. But this also makes it a potential value-added for more grassroots-based websites that will generally care less about how much casual traffic they get, and more about discoverability for their content.

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