The SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text
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What some people miss is this isn't just SEOs gaming the system. This is a system that Google explicitly asks for. I've watched John Mueller's (a Google Search Rep) AMA sessions where he answers questions on SEO and he's advocated for webmasters to add text onto product listing pages to "help users" get a clearer understanding of the page. Nope. It's because even though Google has some of the best technology in the world, it's search algo is still pretty dumb.
No person needs a few sentences of text on an ecommerce page about couches to understand the page is relevant to couches and sofas, but Google does because it only understands text. That's also the reason why any recipe you find on the internet is buried at the bottom of the page.
The pointless adding of content to the internet is annoying as hell, but given that ChatGPT is able to create fairly cogent answers for a majority of queries it's, I'm frankly surprised Google isn't better.
Lastly, this article really only references creating content for SEO which is not all of SEO. Many parts of SEO actually do make sense. For example, making sure your content is actually visible onsite, redirecting old urls to new urls, making sure to internally link to pages people actually care about, etc... These should be website best practices but a ton of websites don't do them.
Good SEO is hard. Creating changes that are good for Google + users takes a lot of thought, effort, and testing. Bad SEO (i.e generating a bunch of pages/useless content for Google) is very easy and you don't need to know anything about actual SEO to do it. For some reason anyone able to look up a keywords search volume and write a post is an SEO.
Google also seems to have it wrong these days. Unless I am searching for a specific website name Google search has been useless for me. General questions are often poorly met with results. I don’t find DuckDuckGo all that better.
The value of ChatGPT as implemented in Bing is it gives you the answer directly and then sites sources.
And now using chatGPT more and more instead of search I think think that there's a big upset in progress. Should be interesting to watch.
Yeah, and its not even that hard. Google could "interrogate" images or even website screenshots for keywords with open source tools. And YouTube is a juggernaut of speech-to-text and video analysis.
I know nothing about Google's innards, but I would guess decision makers aired on the side caution when dealing with their golden goose, rather than focusing on image and context analysis.
I thought this was to game the metrics Google uses to see if a click out was useful. If you see a recipe and then bounce in 5s Google treats that as bad. If you scroll down for 10s looking for the recipe and then bounce after 5 it's not as bad.
My understanding from case studies I've read and tests I've seen done is 1) engagement metrics seem to be most useful at the top 5 rank positions in the search results 2) it's really hard to measure when improved engagement metrics actually improve ranks.
On the flipside adding content to a page usually results in fairly quick change in ranks and is relatively easy to track. And it makes sense. A normal recipe is a list of ingredients and an order/method to cook them. 100-300 words tops in most cases. Not a lot of info for a bot to understand what the context of the recipe is around.
Now if you spend another 750 words writing about how to do it Google gets a lot more context and reinforcement that what you're talking about is actually relevant. Keyword stuffing isn't a thing in that you can literally say the same word over and over and get higher ranks, but if you can stuff a post with relevant keywords sprinkled all over the place that's good enough for Google to say 'oh now I get what this page is about'.
So there may be some slight impact on engagement metrics (which is debatable since a lot of people find all that long text super annoying and will bounce because of it), it's the extra text/keywords that Google understands and values.
As you say, those are part of making a good website, not SEO specifically. I think it's a bit disingenuous for the SEO world to take any credit for them.
Every large site I've worked on doesn't actively think about these problems, and it's the SEO team who has thought about these problems.
Generally people care about their slice of responsibility. At most large organizations with enterprise sites, many parts of SEO falls outside of those slices of responsibility so people don't think about them. This is especially true if it's hard to put dollar values on them.
I mostly agree with what you said in your comment, but you're wrong here. Ad monetization is the reason for recipes being at the end: it's related, but not directly Google's fault.
Having the actual content at the bottom means the proprietor can serve more ads interspersed with filler content, and since it takes longer to read the page, most visitors will stay longer than a few seconds decreasing the bounce rate (which improves SEO, amd more importantly, means you get paid for the ads as the time spent will hit the time-threshold for an ad impression)
but ".. you're wrong here" - not necessarily - both things can be true..
and consider this: Google is choosing to put a bunch of web sites in the top results that instead of giving you the answer you seek (the recipe) - the sites contain the recipe but make you scroll past a bunch of other info - and ads - before you get what you want.
I've seen interesting debates about 'this increases engagement on-page time which the google algo likes ' - and things from googlers that say that's not the thing.. I've seen other guesses as to why..
regardless of the why - google is choosing to reward these sites with top position - they are long winded and include lots of ads.. so both things are true.
and the cynic in me leans toward people's paychecks and stock values are based on a thing.. and the search engine providing sites at the top that increase ad views, and they make money as an ad company.. and the old adage of do the best for the user is not at the forefront.
I've seen it in many other search phrases - things mysteriously happen that include censoring, that also increase the ad spend needed to reach customers.
One can blame in on this or that or point to whatever - but the truth of the outcome is the truth of the outcome - must of what people are searching for is buried and there has been in increase in ad visibility -
maybe that's not a bad thing for some, but it is what it is, and it's also an opportunity ripe for disruption with the likes of chatgpt type things - which is good and bad imho.
Also an opportunity for a more fun search engine - let google be the wanna be high brow prude censor machine it has become, and I think it will be the solid choice as a replacement for the yellow pages for quite some time.. but the best way to search and find many things connected to web, it is not.
Google, it's the new yellow pages. Both useful tools for the masses, and both an expensive must have for many local brick and mortar businesses.
They could stayed neutral arbiters of content but they decided to incentivise websites to host ads, then let them fight to drive traffic to the site.
They deserve whatever doo-doo is accruing to them.
Theyre so clueless that they never seriously fought for social and now most useful (aka human generated) content is hidden behind login screens on Discord and Insta and the like.
I’m calling it now - now that most content we want to engage with is behind login walls, Pagerank/Search is anachronism.
I saw a poster (here on Hacker News maybe?) make the point that the fact that anonymous reviews on e.g. Amazon are no longer trustworthy is the historical norm. The fact that we had ~20 years were we could maybe trust people without their reputation was the weird part not the fact that you no longer can trust them. I mean personally I find it all sad, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Our trust in anonymous people has value and hence exploiting it (and hence destroying that trust) makes sense.
I think all of this is some human version of social entropy at work. Maybe it's a historical ebb and flow over time, but it seems like a natural result of our human nature.
I disagree, they did have reputation. The fact the those anonymous people were online and posting reviews during that specific timeframe in that specific environment served as a filter.
Once everyone was online, the filter no longer filtered, and so the reputation caused by the filter disappeared too.
Today those types of honest reviews are long gone. I have to use all my spidey senses to figure out if a review was paid for, or even written by a human.
Google does punish SEO, but it has failed in adressing the recent trend of blogspam. I think ultimately unless they're whitelisting sites (like SO) there is no way to algorithmically differentiate between blogspam and genuinely useful tech blogs, because the difference lies in natural language and not features of the page. Also, since these blogspam sites use very detailed language, they rank higher despite the language being just disguised keywords.
Ultimately it is up to google to do better if they want to stay relevant. The recent influx of custom search providers is i think a sign that the giant is faltering. People are looking at smaller players and are deciding "google isn't that good to begin with, surely these guys can do better?".
It has always been utterly mindblowing that apparently not a single person with power in the entire chain of command at Google has ever recognized that websites showing exact replicas of content from the very small list of extremely famous moderated content generators like Stack Overflow should just be blackholed. The number of legitimate Stack Overflows (the genre of legitimate content producers, not the specific domain) is very small. The list could be successfully curated manually by a troglodyte.
Like, FFS, give google engineers a button they can click to mark a site as crap. They use the internet too and there are literally tens of thousands of them googling to find things on stack overflow all day every day. All they need is a "this site is an SEO scam" button.
Not doing this speaks directly to either malice or incompetence (personally I think both), because it's not a super obscure problem that nobody inside google has ever encountered before.
I can give you an example, while doing technical SEO I coordinated a project to implement structured metadata to the pages (for example if the page had FAQs we would use the structured data for that).
We went through that effort for Google to change their mind a few months ago. They decided to cut down on displaying featured snippets on search results, and with that we got a hit on our traffic. After following Google's own guidelines, and recommendations.
Dealing with this crap isn't enough punishment?
Nope, that's not even close to enough punishment.
Your problem isn't with Google. Your problem is with your black-hat compatriots. That sucks, because you probably can't fight them on your own. Google has to, and you are the inevitable casualty of that fight.
Given this, a new race to the top will commence by SEOs to try and get on that "3 pack" snippet of information.
Isn't that what GPT is trained on, though? And future iterations as well?
* I know this isn't i18n, but the kind of people who would try this are clearly too stupid to care, or perhaps know.