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Comment by chaos986 | Hacker News Reader

SEO is a scam run by con artists. Google's worth as a search engine is it's ability to rank pages by quality. SEO tries to fake quality or trick Google to ranking objectively bad sites higher.

Red Ventures is trying to get CNET to be worse. with this and the AI written stories. Google should react by delisting all of CNET.

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SEO won a long time ago. Google fights a hopeless war against legions of soulless locusts.

For all its resources it’s incapable of improving the situation. Since it only understands proxies of quality and truth, and these things can be manufactured and industrialized, they are incapable of winning.

Blogspam and fraud consistently outrank the original, and changes to the rules frustrate legitimate sites more than SEO spam. If anything these frequent changes increase the demand for SEO, not make it harder. You just wind up with more.

Until they figure out some kinda digital pesticide for SEO spam, the situation will continue to get worse.

To a large extent yes, but I'd wager a lot of sites have been improved by people reading about ranking and SEO as a lot of it is just better incentives for good/bad behavior (e.g. punishing copy pasting, rewarding relevant keyword usage).

The quality of Google’s search results have been in steady decline for years. Google’s worth as a search engine is mostly the value it accrues to advertisers with pinpoint user targeting at this point.

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