I think SEO mainly affects content which was already very low quality. Recipe blogs are a prime example - this is the worst way to get recipes. It is inferior to books and apps (which are more use in the kitchen), is poorly indexed, ephemeral (depending on the wordpress knowledge of the owner), lacks local context, and has none of the rigour and pragmatic advice of something like seriouseats. They deliberately use weird ingredients I find, perhaps to prevent you from falsifying the quality of the recipe and also to differentiate themselves from tried and trusted recipes (which is what most people want!). The instructions you get on the back of the flour packet are superior to recipe blogs, at least they should work for that type of flour.
How SEO Ruined the Internet
161–170 of 296 posts
Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet
#162A MAJOR problem with google is it's assumption that if you search in English you don't care if the top results are American. I've noticed that on google.co.uk, unless you add 'uk' at the end of your search query you'll always get US sites first [1]. Google clearly lump all English based queries into the same geo-graphical bucket - they never used to do this. --- [1] Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the…
It's even worse when you are trying to search in a language that is not English from a region that is English speaking. I often look for recipes in French or German and it's impossible to find anything. I try to browse to google.de/fr, I try adding site:.fr but it will still try and give me the most English results. My Google search settings indicate I am happy with German and French results but it seems to have no a…
I have the reverse problem: Google would happily return me Polish-language results for everything, where I almost never want that. For the types of searches I do, there's almost never anything worthwhile in my native language. This, + their annoying attempt at detecting which country I'm in (so I would get German results when in Germany, and Chinese results when in China) led me one day to figuring out the magic URL incantation to force English results, and replacing the search in omnibar with that.
Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just tried this out, and it works fine for at least one of the local organizations here, both in Google and DuckDuckGo (530-926-4698). I just tried it with my own number, and my site comes up with both search engines as well.
If I am doing that most of the time the first few hundred results are pages which just list all numbers there are – like in a consecutive manner. Never understood why there are so many of this pages and why you would build one...
Ad revenue.
Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I would have seen this coming years ago. I would have built a Google Custom Search Engine, and every time I ran into a good website, added it to the whitelist. By now, it would probably be alright.
Insert allegory about the best time to plant a tree being 20 years ago... Or today.
It is something ive started now.
Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You're not their customer, advertisers are, so it's only natural that the ads you see aren't personalized. That's never been the goal. It is, however, technically a potential benefit that the more exactly advertisers can target you, the more relevant ads you could be seeing, which is a wonderful sales pitch for users who are agnostic anyway, but that's not how advertising works in practice.
>You're not their customer, advertisers are
Then it's high time everyone but advertisers stopped using google search and start using anything but.
If advertisers are their customers, so be it; let them have it.
Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet
#166It kind of ruined content too. Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content. Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content. In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of conten…
Deary me.
I wish I'd be around to see what future historians / archaeologists make of this.
Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you click the “search instead for...” then the non-video result was exactly what I believe you wanted.
The point is, why is it doing this? It's not even suggesting both God of War and Lord of War, for me all the results on the first page are about God of War.
It's probably correcting people's typos, as well as saving a crap-ton of money this way (search results are undoubtedly cached).
Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients. How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had somethi…
Filler content is the cost of ad supported content sites. Pay for a Cooks Illustrates or NYT Cooking subscription and all these problems go away.
I have never understood what the filler content on recipe pages is accomplishing though. It somehow makes the page do better in google? How?
Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet
#169It kind of ruined content too. Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content. Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content. In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of conten…
Yep. Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients. How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had somethi…
It lets you know whether the recipe is any good.
You searching for a bibimbap recipe and their page is split into Hangul and English pages and this was the recipe their grandma uses? You bet your ass it's going to be good.
You find something on allrecipes.com, how do you know if this is a good recipe? Only if you already know it is.
Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients. How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had somethi…
Filler content is the cost of ad supported content sites. Pay for a Cooks Illustrates or NYT Cooking subscription and all these problems go away.
And if you want it all in one place, an entire compendium of tried and tested recipes, pick up a copy of one of Cooks Illustrated's New Best Recipe books, even an older one.
I have a copy from probably 5 years ago that seems to be out of print and can be had for $7 used. It's 900+ pages of well-tested recipes where each one has a narrative about how they tested and arrived at the final recipe.