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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Moreover people within Google like Matt Cutts seemed to be at the time if not outright encouraging it, at the very least giving pointers on how to game the system. This strikes me as more relevant than ever, and I have to imagine the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically.

Beyond that, the way Google now ranks pages based on how well they fit their pretty limited definition of working on mobile and how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.

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SEO / billboards / paid-for advertising is basically legal propaganda (arguably a form of mind control or more neutral we can say reality shaping through narrative structuring).

I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting, anywhere else is "public domain" and shouldn't be allowed in my opinion. It is the root to many evils, it is the mechanism that trends towards hacking the user in the loop in a positive feedback system, which also optimizes at the users expense yet depends on the user. Quite parastic.

> I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting

That's the horrifying beauty of it. Everything has been turned into a marketplace.

Everything is a marketplace. In all situations, the human being follows incentices.

Following incentives is not the same as a marketplace. Marketplaces have a number of additional assumptions.

* Items are capable of being traded.

* The items being traded are unchanged by the process of assigning a numeric value.

* Abstract concepts such as “risk” and “investment” are best measured in the same numeric values as are used for concrete items.

Adding to that, even if I were to accept the reasoning that following incentives is equivalent to being in a marketplace, your statement that “In all situations, the human being follows incentives .” is simply untrue. It ignores the existence of self-sacrifice (e.g. a soldier sacrificing themself to save comrades), the existence of self-harm (e.g. Jonestown), and the distinction between incentives and perceived incentives (e.g. also Jonestown).

The first does not follow from the second. Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition. If all human behavior was framed as a competition, we would not have been able to construct communities.

>Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition

Humans spent far longer in kill others mode than in don't kill others mode. Incentives to not kill others is fairly new in history.

Can you cite the pop-sci TV show you got that from? You've got it exactly the wrong way around.

Evidence of deadly human-on-human violence mostly starts showing up with the Neolithic period, before that humans didn't go out of their way to kill each other as much. It looks a lot like you need to be settled and amass possessions to give people a good enough reason to kill each other. That's recent behavior as far as our species is concerned.

https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

Death by homicide seems much worse the further back you go, on balance.

When you say “fairly new” what timeframe are you thinking about?

Just because we have a ton of evidence of humans collaborating as far as historical artifacts go back. But then of course with the appropriate perspective almost everything is fairly new. Would you call Göbekli Tepe fairly new for example?

After all 9000 BCE was just yesterday compared to the invention of multicellular life for example. Which is also massively about cooperation.

Ew, yuck

That's just the ultra-capitalist creed.

And that's just name calling.

Can you name a modern monetary theory that does not model supply and demand (production and consumption , if you prefer) and does not devolve quickly into black markets in practice?

I hate ads as much as everyone else (and actively block the hell out of it)

At the same time, ads made a lot of the free web possible.

I run services making money with ads: I would not be able to work on them without.

Or maybe the revenue I would make is too little to bother with all the stupid EU regulations around VAT - ads offer a simple solution and you get a single B2B transaction, while providing values to Customers.

If we had easy to use cheap (or free? I'm sure we can work out a model based on profiting off the analytics alone if we streamline the service and don't become as bloated as VISA / Mastercard) microtransactions with low fees and no ***ing bureaucrauts, maybe ads would not be needed as much.

But we don't. And a big chunk of the last 20 years of internet innovations was sponsored with ads money.

> At the same time, ads made a lot of the free web possible.

What made all the free web possible was free software, not ads. Google and the likes created empires through ads and breaking laws, we owe nothing to them. The sooner they go, the better. Also, they don't own the ads business model, there are healthier ways to sell, buy and deliver ads and that's not what Google and Meta are doing. They need to go.

> And a big chunk of the last 20 years of internet innovations was sponsored with ads money.

and a much bigger chunk was killed with it.

>and a much bigger chunk was killed with it.

To say nothing of the opportunity costs. They killed a lot of what was, but they’ve also prevented so much of the promise of the internet from coming to fruition. Lost time, lost talent and lives, and a gaping hole in society where a more productive internet might have been. Somehow we let them.

You are right. But the pendulum swings back.

It’s hard to swing back over walled gardens, they employ behavioral tactics to hook people into certain behaviors. When internet was new it grew organically, these tactics weren’t needed. Now all large platforms do it. Imagine how much effort it would take to unhook people off doomscrolling for example.

Yeah but at the same time, 1% of the internet today is bigger than what I thought it was a huge market 20 years ago, when I started. And now with the new tech available I can reach even a bigger global audience.

Big tech became too big even for themselves. Infinite growth is impossible and the capital market will punish them heavily when they stop growing. And they will. This big tech recess might never end. The likes of Google and Meta will go into maintenance mode and operate with much smaller engineering teams. I'm betting on the end of an era.

It is possible it’s the end of an era and when an era ends another one begins. Maybe something good will come out of the ashes but it will take a while…

It was all considered risky and niche (anything on the internet).

What made the free web possible was first and foremost, access to it.

Then, probably a combination of technological, cultural, and economic factors and the human beings behind the scenes who worked to either create software to give it away or to make money with ads by creating foobar service.

Yes, free software, and yes, because of advertising.

It’s both.

It is not both. The free web would never exist without free software. But would have thrived even more without those parasites.

It doesn't sound like you hate ads as much as I do. :)

What I do: work a day job to make money and then give my content away for free, or charge what the market will bear. No ads, no SEO. Classic, old-school Internet.

> I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic.

Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked? If so, why isn't this done? You would have thought the original PageRank was meant to combat this because useless articles wouldn't get linked to.

For what it's worth, whenever I'm helping with SEO, it's generally only to encourage website owners to use semantic HTML tags properly and structure their content in a way (e.g. titles, headings, sections, new pages with links between them) that's easier for humans with and without screen readers, and for search bots to read. I don't like the practice of writing articles to target profitable keywords that aren't relevant to your site or writing bloated articles.

Unfortunately, all of this in lumped together as "SEO" so it's become a bad word.

> how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.

I think speed is only a small ranking boost. Maybe this will increase over time. If it was a big boost right now, it would have forced every website to make large immediate changes which would have been very controversial I'd think.

Google use page rank to figure out popularity of page, semantic analysis of content and manual overwrite of rank.

If you are travel agency you create crap content and you create links to said pages. You target specific keywords and since your overall page authority is high then your shitty reasult flood google.

If you have price comparision website you get manually de-ranked because you compete with google shopping.

If you have stackoverflow clone you rank very high because google can serve more ads on your page vs stackoverflow. Even if google do recognize that content was scraped from SO, they choose to make money.

On some keywords olny way to rank in results is to directly pay to google. For some keywords whole page of results is payed advertisments.

Just to highlight few mechanisms.

> Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked?

Yes, there is. But not fixing it makes the user stay longer on Google results then driving ads revenue. Google makes money out of bad results so they won't change this.

> I have to imagine the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically.

Funny enough, LLMs are actually for the very first time challenging Google’s utility as a knowledge engine.

I see more and more Non-techie people asking ChatGPT about receptors or locations instead of Google.

Also, if there’s anything that I need to research and it’s not a general knowledge stuff but something like “How long I can travel with a EU registered car in Turkey” I will use Bing Chat, Perplexity or ChatGPT. I gave up Google already, it’s just too much spam and low quality content that I have enough incentive to break my usual workflow and habits and try LLMs.

I’m sure Google is doing great monetarily with search as if everything is garbage Ads are quality content but the technology to bypass both the ads and garbage is here.

Will it last though. How soon until LLMs get gamed as well - probably directly, e.g. looking for a product that can do X, SEOs battle it out to make sure a specific product gets suggested by the LLM.

There are many problems with LLMs as knowledge engines,

- as mentioned they can be gamed just like Google

- they hallucinate, adding another possible source of errors to the results

- they kill off the websites they scrap training data from making it unsustainable long term

I guess we can enjoy it as it lasts. Maybe if the LLM business model sticks with the paid subscription, then LLMs being on the user's side would try hard to provide high quality output. I don't think that Google has any incentive to do so, the shittier the organic content the more relevant the paid content as long as the users keep coming.

As for the content providers, maybe they can once again do it without expectations of direct compensation. Maybe a content about Kazakhstan could be created by people who feel patriotic about the country and write about it because they would like foreigners know about their country.

The degradation of quality can be attributed to Google but it's not only Google's part. The content went to the gutter when professionals entered the space and optimised for the business model that puts eyeballs above anything. Lack of such a revenue might actually be therapeutic.

It would be ironic, if Google search, SEO and LLMs would make the internet so unusable as to give redacted content in the form of books and physical journals a second life.

Well, my white list of sites providing good content for my interests actually is incredibly short by now anyway, in total maybe a handfull.

> Books

Greedy publishers, Amazon and LLMs are already killing that hope.

> the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically.

Do you mean LLMs will be used to generate more SEO content that is irrelevant?

Doesn't it work both ways? You can use LLMs to filter out irrelevant content better than ever? A lot of the time I use ChatGPT-4 it's as a search engine - and I don't even mean with the Browser plugin, I mean it's quicker to ask ChatGPT-4 for its encoded knowledge than to Google and click on links.

GPT4 is trained on mostly garbage optimised for SEO though.

If general AI, let's call it Heavenweb or Netsky, comes along and it is based on the knowledge of the internet I am not that worried so. GPT4 is trained on SEO crap, parts of it have been propably already written using GPT3. So by the time Skynet comes along, it will assume the bot-to-bot SEO crap content to be actually true, SEO contebt written by AI for AI trained on AI created SEO content. Eith that, Skynet would never be able to achieve anything, no decent scrambled egg let alone a T-100.

Maybe, but there is plenty of non-garbage information encoded so I don't understand the argument.

I only ask it questions whose answers I can verify e.g. if I ask it how to do something in F#, a language I'm not very familiar with, I can easily confirm whefher the code does what I need it to or not.

You can pump as much SEO garbage out as you want, it doesn't change the value of LLMs to me in this context.

Clean datasets are critical in machine learning. Its kind of a miracle that LLMs work as well as they do now, but every drop of garbage (like SEO garbage) makes them worse and less efficient.

For example, early versions of GPT would effectively treat the string “SolidGoldMagikarp” as a random word. It was the username of a prolific poster on the /r/counting subreddit, which consists entirely of posters counting upward. This subreddit was excluded from the training data for being useless, but was still used in making the tokenizer. As a result, the string “SolidGoldMagikarp” was a single token with no training data about it.

This was later fixed by updating the tokenizer, but it demonstrates the importance of clean datasets at all stages.

Do you have a link?

Twelve years ago, this wasn't even a thought in the back of my head, and I bet those in the SEO industry never thought Google would let things deteriorate to such an extreme.

That discussion was well underway in 2011. Here’s two random finds (I guess Google search isn’t completely useless yet…):

https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-...

https://www.anildash.com/2011/01/03/threes_a_trend_the_decli...

I do but it's not worth reading. It's rambling and unfocused. I made my point here far more clearly than there.

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