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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

This is just a preview of things to come.

Wait a few weeks until Google is completely swamped with ChatGPT SEO pages barely distinguishable from the real thing.

If I worked at search quality at Google, I'd be very worried.

The most recent update also managed to rank ML generated content above written content in many instances, compounding the problem. I absolutely expect a carpet bombing of SEO results with spam.

My friend has already re-written the marketing pages for his startup using ChatGPT.

As you said, it'll only get worse from here, which in some ways, might make a lot of it easier to sift through. That is, if everyone uses machine-generated content for marketing, the winning strategy no longer becomes "write the best marketing copy to get people interested", it becomes (for the users), "simply filter out all marketing copy and rely instead on results" (or something else that is difficult to falsify).

Hasn't that already been the case for years?

Depending on the query, yes. Google search has different ranking strategies for different queries, and some of them seem more robust to simple SEO tactics than others. I think the ranking strategy for e-commerce searches and product reviews does a poor job with spam sites, but the ranking strategy for news queries works pretty well, typically providing timely and relevant answers from reputable sources.

Google has been saying for years that it wants to get rid of backlinks and value them less, and apparently they already do. [0]

I wouldn't be surprised if they revert the direction and put a significant importance back on links because of this kind of technology.

[0]: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-less-impact-34493....

You can't really put importance on backlinks either, because those are abused in their own special way

I am afraid for whats to come. This is truly only the beginning. Good luck everyone. See you on the other side.

Sworn enemies unite against a common foe. This foretaste of AI may be a timely wake-up call about what technology is doing to us. We may be forced to start treating each other as humans. In that case, ChatGPT will be seen as a watershed moment in the retaking of humane technology.

Chatgpt SEO is no different from existing filler SEO. If google falls for the latter, why shouldn't it fall for the former

ChatGPT SEO is higher quality than existing filler SEO and probably quicker and cheaper to generate.

you are right ( tried it)

I expect Google to be irrelevant soon enough.

ChatGPT already does a better job of finding answers to a lot of technical questions than Google.

I agree with this. Ask specific tech questions (e.g. what is the vacuum (in Torr) inside a vacuum tube?) and ChatGPT give a direct answer. Ask Google? Go ahead, grovel thought the ads, irrelevant results, and maybe you'll find something relevant.

Happy Hunting...

It depends on the question. Try asking it how fast you would need to travel to get from Los Angeles to New York in 1 hour. It consistently tells me that this is impossible, even if I was traveling at the speed of light.

Nope. It is StackOverflow that is irrelevant. Not Google. Especially when most of all AI including ChatGPT still cannot transparently explain their own decisions.

If I were Google this is what I would actually be worried about. I ask ChatGPT a typical question and I get a clear short answer.

I ask Google the same thing have to wade through a 1000 line blog post talking about 25 other things to finally find the one piece of information I need.

It's extremely naive to believe Google doesn't have chatgpt capability but simply do not find it currently economical to augment or replace search with it (these answers are expensive to generate). Give it time for efficiency to scale.

Yes, because ChatGPT is not bombed with SEO currently.

How is ChatGPT ever going to be bombed with SEO?

Reddit and Twitter are going to be overwhelmed with bots indistinguishable from humans.

A lot of reddit and twitter posts are already just people regurgitating and rehashing what they have heard/read from others, mostly without a lot of critical thought. Is this really going to be very different?

You have a point. But now it will happen at scale quickly, cheaply, and easily for an order of magnitude more impact.

Beyond these text-based social media platforms, I could see the next generation of TikTok/Instagram "influencer" social media adopting AI rails so there's next to zero effort put into creation. The photography, trends, personalities - all of it - will be generated.

Your comment reminds me of something I read in Ouspensky's narrative of the teachings of Gurdjieff: (from memory) most people are automatons, so they don't actually operate at a very high level of intelligence to begin with.

The above was also expressed (in less cruel terms) by DFW in his "what is water" commencement speech at Kenyon College: (again, from memory) it is our natural tendency to operate in "default mode", which we must fight.

Please don't "namedrop" by using acronyms for people that you (perhaps subconsciously) assume are absolutely known to all. David Foster-Wallace is just fine.

Your point is valid. However, it was laziness due to typing on mobile rather than pretentiousness or attempting to show off. I find it interesting that you would impute "namedropping" as the explanation for what I did :)

It's a matter of scale, you could have personalized propaganda for each community.

Agree with this comment writing like a teen: " Reddit and Twitter are going to be overwhelmed with bots indistinguishable from humans. "

    Totally agree. It's crazy to think that bots could be indistinguishable from humans. Like, how are we even supposed to know who's real and who's not? It's kind of scary, but also kind of cool in a weird way. But yeah, I can definitely see how it could be a problem if there are too many bots on social media. It could be really confusing and overwhelming. So, I hope there's a way to deal with it.

Ye ... ChatGPT can easily pose as an random Reddit comment writer. Just remove the tryhard "'". Those kind of communities will implode. The comments there are already kinda random and have almost no thread running through them. Perfect for ChatGPT.

Imagine how easy it will be to create big fake subs and gaslight people into believing something is sub consensus?

> SEO pages

I think GPT could improve things in this regard. It's already a huge garbage pile, so we might as well go all in and at least generate better garbage.

The current AI generated SEO content is relatively easy to detect because much of it tends to make incoherent statements. We don't want better AI bots feeding us lies that are hard to detect even for competent people who know to be wary of it.

That would actually slightly improve Google search results given the generated spam garbage that comes up today.

Considering the quality GPT spits out, it would likely be an improvement compared to the crap I get now.

For years, it is happening much before ChatGPT in front of your eyes.

Luckily for them, almost nobody works at search quality at Google.

So, effectively the status quo?

People have been using something similar for more than a decade. I know of a guy using tools to generate seo content for his 2k+ websites since around 2010. His work just got a lot easier.

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