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How SEO Ruined the Internet

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Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#21

Post by trendscout »

mcv wrote: post #5

I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…

DDG doesn't work for me either when it comes to more general, not tech-ish stuff. One thing for news I found was https://yetigogo.com

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#22

Post by eitland »

mcv wrote: post #5

I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…

To me it seems the problem with Google goes far deeper than struggling with bad SEO.

- For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to enclose our queries in double quotes and set the "verbatim" option.

- Ad targeting has been so bad it has been ridiculous. Yes, on average it works but around the edges it is somewhere between tragic and hilarious. For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays, not tech conferences, not magazine subscriptions, not offers from local shops, but scammy dating sites that was so ridiculous that I cannot imagine how most people would fall for them. (For a while I wondered if this was all a fluke but now I have confirmed it happens to others in my situation as well.)

- Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example: what is the idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while I'm logged in with two different google controlled accounts, one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#23

Post by netsharc »

mda wrote: post #18
netsharc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have another "Google is shit now" anecdote: a few months ago I wanted to look up some trivia for the movie "Lord of War". I entered this term in Google, and since there was a game that was just released, it responded with "Showing you results for 'God of War'". No results on the front page had anything related to the Nic Cage movie.

Can you find the exact search term from your search history?

It was "lord of war director's commentary". I thought it was because many more people were googling for the game, but I just tried and Google is still doing this!

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#24

Post by ThePhysicist »

If I had one word to characterize the modern web it would be "shallow". SEO and commercialization have led to a world wide web where I can easily find 100 shallow, keyword-optimized articles on "machine learning for IoT" published on high-ranking websites, but not a single page with actual in-depth information about the topic.

But there still is great content on the web, it just becomes harder to find in all the noise. I think websites like HN and Reddit and - to some degree - sites like Twitter with their human-based curation are really important for this, so I'm glad they're thriving.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#25

Post by gsich »

mcv wrote: post #5

I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…

I see mainly two problems:

- Affiliate spam from douchebags that provide "reviews" of products just to link back to Amazon. Makes it nearly impossible to find actual reviews of products.

- People who type whole sentences in natural language into Google. I tried since I used the internet to serach for keywords, omit as much words as possible that aren't necessary. Most people (after I guess ~2010?) don't. This worsens the results.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#26

Post by CameronBanga »

mcv wrote: post #5

I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…

This is correct. DuckDuckGo is finally better.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#27

Post by capableweb »

eitland wrote: post #22
mcv wrote: post #5

I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…

To me it seems the problem with Google goes far deeper than struggling with bad SEO. - For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to enclose our queries in doubl…

> Yes, on average it works

Maybe we frequent vastly different websites, but this has absolutely not been true for me, even for companies who are supposed to be experts at using their data. I don't think I've ever seen an ad that has actually been relevant, and I'm not even trying to hide my habits or behaviors.

For example, take Amazon. Their ads all over the web frequently recommends me stuff I've already bought just a month ago, the very same product. Or the products they recommend are way out of my zone, like woman clothing while I never purchased woman clothing or anything close to it.

So, I'm not sure how the ad market even goes around and my friends are describing the same behavior from the ads, even from companies that have my entire shopping history already (like Amazon)

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#28

Post by monk_e_boy »

I worked in SEO for ages, and it's shady as f. You can buy links from anyone, the BBC the guardian, the times... It just costs money. You can ask/force people to take links down (copyright scare, sue, threaten). Fake blogs, we used to run a bunch, some became so popular they became actual blogs on that subject. We'd get money from competitor SEO companies for links on it. There are tons of niche subjects with no info on the internet. We'd often put it up for SEO purposes. Wikipedia was started by an SEO company. The rumour was that Wales started it as a cheap way to get high page rank links to sites he owned. But the rewards were huge. Get a struggling car insurance site from position 11 in Google to position 2 or 1 and their profits would be 10x. They would show us numbers from each advertising sector, SEO, radio, TV, newspapers, etc. Super interesting. Break that down by age / gender ... Very interesting. No wonder the internet is a shit show. So much money involved and zero regulation.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#29

Post by sumo89 »

silexia wrote: post #13

The article linked here has a good point it is trying to make, but makes a number of false points that undercut it's goal. 1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams. Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO. The…

I agree, it's easy to hate on the current system and I think the ads are getting way too similar to the real results now. But all those websites that have a massive list of names/place at the bottom just to come higher up the search, that was the real worst time. When you'd search "Handyman in Leeds" and the top results would be for a company that isn't even in the right location but was big enough to list highly and had "Handyman in Leeds" in hidden text at the bottom of the page.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#30

Post by Cyberdog »

silexia wrote: post #13

The article linked here has a good point it is trying to make, but makes a number of false points that undercut it's goal. 1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams. Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO. The…

> Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.

Typical SEO cargo cult behavior. This worked at one time, or at least it seemed to work, so we'll just keep doin' it.

I can't really blame SEO people, though. As long as Google keeps its algorithms secret, I'm not sure what else they're supposed to do except publish good content and hope for the best - which, in an ideal world, would be good enough, but…

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