How SEO Killed Online Reviews | Hacker News Reader

How SEO Killed Online Reviews

koozai.com

92 pointstrevin45 comments

Gamification of SEO killed online reviews.

More and more people are "understanding" how SEO works and they're simply manipulating it. By ranking early for a keyword that has yet to gain popularity, they stand a chance at getting a lot of traffic for a short period of time, early on. One can assume this is to earn ad revenue from the traffic but it's obviously not a sustainable method as the more reputable sites will gain favorable rankings quickly. These are the same people that will earn 100's of $$ from their website per month, and sell it on Flippa.com for 6-12x their monthly income. Then they build a new site, and repeat.

I am currently working in the automotive distribution industry, and pretty much any automotive site you find is using this method of maniplation. It sucks.

An example; Just type in 2014 BMW 3 Series, 2015 BMW 3 Series and 2016 BMW 3 Series to see people using this method of maniplation.

As SEO is blamed, so one could also blame the existance of search engines themselves. What this really has to do with is "meeting consumer demand."

It just happens, not by coincidence, that there is a lot less competition in areas where the end product doesn't actually exist.

Last month I tried to reverse look up a phone number with Intelius. They tried to upsell me a bunch of monthly subscriptions, and then told me the phone number wasn't actually in their system but they would look for it. I was to expect an answer in 3 days. 9 days later they said they couldn't find it and refunded my charge.

Intelius knew they wouldn't be able to have that number. But, they knew there was an X% chance I'd sign up for their monthly recurring service; something I suspect would not have been refunded.

There are plenty of other businesses making money selling things that don't exist. Some are arguably legitimate, such as Kickstarter. Others, such as pyramid schemes, are quite less so.

In my opinion, you're not entirely wrong nor are you right.

For one, I don't think that ranking for 2015 BMW 3 Series (my former example) is meeting any demand. The car does not even exist yet; I'm not even sure if BMW would even be working on it at the moment. How can that be meeting demand?

The example you gave with intelius is not entirely wrong persay; as they did "try" to perform a valuable service in the end. However, what if a random nefarious individual started ranking for non-existant phone numbers, took your money, and ran?

Gamification of SEO is a slippery slope. Sometimes it's useful and other times it goes horribly wrong. It comes down human intentions and search engine sorting out the good vs the bad, I guess. I have not yet known a machine to determine human intention.

It doesn't really matter whether intent can be divined, because perverse incentives can be engineered out of the system if the resources and will are present.

Did Intelius "try," or did they get free 9 day loan?

Oddly, you are the 4th google result for 2016 BMW 3 series. Below you there are sites offering used 2016 bmws.

There ARE valid ways to create content to satisfy these searches...

Someone who searches "2014 BMW 3 Series" is probably trying to find out what the product roadmap for 3 series BMW's looks like. They're asking, "Should I buy now, or are there any cool features I should wait for?"

What's the right content to deliver them? Here's a novel idea... Answer their fracking question... provide the product roadmap (as much as possible). Summarize the grapevine/rumors... Analyze the history of product releases and competition and make some intelligent guesses. Does BMW have a history of making major changes in even years? Tell the people.

Here's a good example of "future content" done right: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

All of that kind of content has the right to exist, rank, and produce income for its creator.

The real problem is that there's no good content being created for these queries because the people who "get it" (i.e. produce content that consumers want, not just that you FEEL like) don't command the editorial resources within legitimate/authoritative news/content organizations.

I don't see how SEO is to blame for this. Shitty publications will always write inaccurate, linkbait headlines...or "eye-bait", before the Internet existed.

This gives an opening to sites that put real work into their editorial content. Unless I'm trying to get a gauge of some random non-heavily-promoted product (like earphones) that I find on sale...I will always go to a trusted site for review. Life is too short to parse through random reviews from untrusted parties as it is, even if none of them are "fake" reviews.

EDIT:

Here's an example. DPReview is almost always the last major reviewer to cover a camera. Yet they are at the top of the search results for pretty much every camera they review

https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=0&source...

> don't see how SEO is to blame for this. Shitty publications will always write inaccurate, linkbait headlines...or "eye-bait", before the Internet existed.

The difference is that since Adsense everyone has become a publisher. Just go to your favorite freelancing site and see how many "projects" are there for badly written content.

Google giveth and Google taketh away.

There's a link to DPReview in the footer of every single Amazon.com page. If that's not a good signal for a search engine then I don't know what is.

Huh, so there is. Amazon bought them in 2007. I've been reading DPReview constantly, but I never knew that.

And I've also learned that today. So I guess they're not the best example here...

I thought DPReview would be near the top of the search results because their reviews are absolutely excellent, if a little impenetrable to newbies.

Right...that's my point. DPreview is a site that should've been killed off by the SEO tactics listed. They typically publish weeks/months after the competition. Yet because they are so reliably comprehensive, they still get the traffic/links to maintain their search result dominance.

You're right, I missed your point entirely and thought it was some sort of slam on my beloved DPReview and was honor-bound to come to its defense.

My mistake.

but they review products that are loved by hobbyists and professionals. I'm not sure this would work for something like washer and drier reviews.

The exception doesn't prove the rule.

Amazon review fraud is rampant, and with enough effort, they'll do something about it. I've worked w/teams there who, over time, develop very complex queries on the back end, and use these to remove sellers who violate policy. There are all kinds of additional tricks sellers or manufacturers use to make their reviews look legit, such as using Amazon gift cards to prevent tracing back to a specific credit card holder, and to ensure the "Verified Amazon Purchase" indicator shows on the review. Helpful votes are crucial and there seem to be very complex rules behind which votes get counted and which don't. Some combination of accounts being related via credit card on file, IP address, possibly length of user account history, etc. One difficulty for Amazon is that their community review policing department is disconnected from their seller performance team. My company's work with them has improved the communication, as well as the realization that user accounts that leave fraudulent reviews cannot be treated as merely rogue buyer community members, but rather have to be tied back to sellers and manufacturers who are the real benefactors of these fraudulent (positive or negative) reviews.

We've come a long way from manufacturers blatantly paying people for positive reviews. http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive-belki...

I don't really see how this relates to SEO at all. If anything, this is link bait.

It has more to do with publications writing unsupported reviews for products trying to get clicks. This is no different than tabloids printing sensationalized headlines to get eyes when you're standing in line at the grocery store.

I just ran a search for 'Nintendo Wii U' and the whole front page contains none of these types of articles reviewing the Wii U. The front page has articles from ABC News, e3, Youtube, Amazon, etc. If someone is searching for 'Nintendo Wii U Reviews' and the results return the only page's available that display themselves as 'reviews' then who's fault is that? The searcher, who is uninformed enough to not realize that the Wii U can't be reviewed yet because it is not available, or Google, who assumes the searcher wants to find reviews for the Wii U, regardless of their validity?

If I search for 'aliens are real' I get results that support my search query which assumes aliens are real. It's not Google's job to decide if 'aliens are real' or not. It's job is to return relevant results for what I searched for. If I want 'Wii U Reviews' then I'll get reviews, regardless if they are valid or not.

Of course it has to do with SEO. The reason to write those fake reviews is not (only) to get people reading those before the product is out, but mostly to have better google rankings (page age seems to have some weight).

This might be true, but once the Wii U starts to receive legitimate reviews from credible sources, these 'faux' reviews will be crushed by the authority of Gamespot, CNET, etc. providing real reviews that are accumulating great number links. Right now, these fake reviews are killing the SERPs because there is nothing else to return for reviews of the Wii.

When you're looking to buy a product that isn't the kind of thing reviewed by sites you already know, it can be hard to find where credible sources are. What I generally try to do is start by adding "forum" to my search query with the goal of finding a group of hobbyists somewhere. If I can find a discussion among hobbyists that is somewhat related to the product I want, then often they will mention the sites they're reading or buying from. Usually there will be a couple of brands that get fought over, and if nothing else it can help discover better search terms.

you don't need to add forum, in Google click more on the left side, and then select "discussions"...and it'll limit the results to just forums/message boards etc

Search for "name of product" "+problems" or "+faults"

That will get you to real reviews, ads don't generally publicize problems with their product, AND probably more what you want to know.

You don't care that lots of people bought it and liked it - you want to know what the problems are.

"For consumers my main advice would be to find a website that you can trust and stick with it."

This was one of the founding principles of the slashtag system at Blekko.com. Pure algorithmic search fails in highly contested search queries because of the people trying to game results. The idea is that if you've got a slashtag with your favorite review sites in it you can have that auto-boosted in your regular search results and 'ungame' the gamers.

Yeah, the best SEO coup I ever made was when I covered a news story a few days before it happened and got 40,000 hits because I ranked #1 for it when it got on TV news.

(How did I cover it before it happened? Because this event was one of a series of events, and I had covered an earlier event at the same place involving the same people that wasn't quite so outrageous)

1) Create page with title "<COUNTRY NAME> 2012 tsunami" for all countries in the world 2) ??? 3) Profit.

I find it ironic that a company that offers SEO services would send followed OB links to sites that they claim are harming the web.

"query deserves freshness" is part of Google's algorithm so it knows to rank the newest articles at the top. It works great for news driven sites, works bad for e-commerce type sites that restock older items but they get outranked by a news site.

It has been years since providing SEO services for a client meant 'make and market a website in the best way to accurately be indexed by search engines'.

Now it seems to mean 'make a website rank higher than it should in search engines'.

It's important to find a reviewer you can trust in an area. I used to like Ben Kuchera's video game reviews at Ars Technica, Anandtech for hardware and Geek Brief (now Geek Beat) for random gadgets.

Yes, but those guys are losing the eyeballs of the masses with the borderline-fake SEO-oriented reviews. As the OP states, if the trend continues they will disappear.

It's not a terribly recent trend, though, and some sites are still flourishing, so it's not inevitable.

It's worth noting that Ben carved out his section of Ars Technica himself, basically proving the value of his paycheck by starting to write content and bringing in the readers. Prior to that, gaming coverage on Ars was extremely light to nonexistent. Now Kyle Orland is keeping up Ars's gaming coverage, and Ben has started another gaming coverage site at Penny Arcade.

Both are using an existing, relatively successful property to bootstrap, but that's fairly common in any business (the property may be called "your investors"), and coverage there and other places has arguably opened up a market for more independent game coverage.

The web may need a social, distributed 'demerit' system which can punish subtle abuses faster than Google: a downvote button that works anywhere, and is somewhat gaming-resistant. (Even being just lightly more resistant than current keyword-squatting, click-baiting, link-whoring would be a marginal win.)

Zed Shaw's 'Utu'/http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com is one exploration of this concept.

There's a big opportunity to solve this problem. I've always thought that a combination of expert reviews, combined with user reviews and those found on other reliable sources (Yelp, Amazon, etc) that were weighted via an algorithm could provide a more fair "review score" for products and services. Just like anything, the more data you get, the easier it is to provide a fair quantitative assessment.

So, don't trust reviews from sources you don't know. That's where social networks can help.

> Yes the official Nintendo magazine is impartial so this probably isn’t a deliberate strategy by the brand.

Impartial? Not unless things have changed a great deal from when I was reading _Nintendo Power_ in the early 2000s...

I think gamification of SEO is killing all kinds of search, and this is part of why Google is investing in social search and G+.

Links are have more value when they're connected to a person's reputation.

The only bad thing I can see is that the first-movers are stupid enough not to update the reviews when new version or whatever changes comes out.

While there's certainly a lot of crap out there, the example used is weird. Yep, if you search for reviews for a product for which no credible reviews exist yet (due to it being unreleased), you're going to find garbage.

Search for reviews for a product which actually exists, and you might get some better results. Drop the "U" from "Nintendo Wii Review" and you'll find reviews as sensible as you could hope for.

Try finding a review for any printer. or a car. or most cell phones. It's all link bait tar-pit SEO sites. This is what the article is talking about and he's absolutely right.

However, this does bring in an opportunity for someone to displace google. Not with better search but with better find-what-I'm-looking-for engines.

have you tried that? I don't know if it's changed recently or not, but I just tried some searches for reviews of a printer, a car, and a cellphone and got all seemingly reputable links on the first page.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hp+officejet+pro+8600+review

https://www.google.com/search?q=2012+BMW+3+Series+reviews

https://www.google.com/search?q=lg+nitro+hd+review

(these seemed like fairly typical products you might search for in these categories...I don't actually know any of them very well)

Now, that's not to say that cnet is the best place to get reviews, but it definitely isn't anywhere near as bad as the sites I seem to remember review queries formerly returning.

What we really need is a good way of searching for those really good review sites that people who know about them absolutely trust. I can't think of any way to structure a query that might get me from looking for a camera to danso's endorsement of DPReview above. Narrowing to forums might help get you there, but it would be nice to not have to open a bunch of discussion pages and scan for decent seeming sites.

Yes...perhaps one that is able to efficiently collect a database of product stats (including release date) and use that as a signal to gauge whether a "review" is actually a review.

But this seems like an almost-already-solved machine learning problem, right? Google's spider will net not just fake reviews, but previews of a given item...if it finds that reliable (high PageRank) sites have "previews" of said item, and a bunch of random sites have "reviews"...all within the same date, then it could make a judgment, right?

Pretty similar problem with online travel information, fwiw. Tons of low-information sites that exist solely to affiliate-link you to Orbitz or hotels.com, which often still rank highly.

you might also find my earlier comment relevant - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972595

I think that fake reviews (shilling) is a special class of problem. I don't believe it fits any of the normal categories of fraud (i.e. that's why I was happy it kind of was artificially added there) and yet I believe that what we lose by not regulating it is an important enough commons that it should be protected.

Congrats on making it to the first page! :)

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