Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How SEO Ruined the Internet

superhighway98.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 296 posts

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#211

Post by cookiengineer »

josephjrobison wrote: post #180
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…

Google is of course going to return the most popular results to please the largest amount of people. If you're looking for more technical results, it'll take a more technical approach. You should learn search operators - https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en - that allow you to control the results for specific sites or very detailed requests. Even better, set up a custom search engine - https://su…

We should manifest a website that we can both find right now, agree on the search terms and operators used...

... and then meet again, in say, 3 years, where this content is either only findable on tiktokterest or not at all anymore.

Google has not a search problem. It has a chronological and social one.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#212

Post by alexmingoia »

kabacha wrote: post #210
alexmingoia wrote: post #194

I really dislike posts like this on HN. It’s essentially whining. The author does not suggest any alternative, does not offer any ideas of their own, and just laments the state of the world. Instead let’s upvote articles on how to build search engines, how search indexing could be improved, how Google’s search works, etc.

Why does an article have to do both: raise the problem and provide a fix for it? Do you also expect journalists to catch serial killers?

There's a difference between breaking news and lamenting the state of the world. Journalists don't write articles that say nothing but "Serial killers are terrible. I want to live in a world without serial killers."

We can agree to disagree. I personally do not find any value in people complaining without illuminating the problem they're complaining about, and seeking or proposing a different vision or solution.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#213

Post by justlexi93 »

I mean yes SEO doesn’t allow for as simple entry into a market, it is something that’s essential for starting an online business now, but for the most part it’s fair. For information searching that’s all just anecdotal, while it’s true that SOME sites may attempt to “rewrite history,”I highly doubt they make up even 1% of the entire internet. So maybe its inconveniencing to someone who doesn’t know how to properly search for what they’re looking for beyond typing in words and getting mad when the can’t find exactly what they want in the first page, but in no way is it “ruining the internet.”

Also why did you post this to an economy subreddit??

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#214

Post by ip26 »

warent wrote: post #155
owlninja wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recipe blogs are the worst! Just get to the goods already!

Years ago when I was a child growing up in the icy woods of Alaska, my parents ... ... And that was when we realized that the kindling was all damp. What to do! Four hours we ... ... it reminded of our travels in Italy ... ... And that brings us to our famous three-ingredient peanut butter cookie recipe:

I once came across a "world's most amazing curry recipe" that had two ingredients; rice, and a jar of storebought curry sauce. It was actually kind of tragic.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#215

Post by ip26 »

cookiengineer wrote: post #208
RobertoG wrote: post #20

It 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…

Every time I land on websites that have such content I am wondering why anybody would want that kind of traffic. I mean, don't they have server costs? It's like they own an infinite amount of money bucket that constantly gets refilled somehow. Why are advertisers even paying them for such impressions? Are they so ridiculously retarded in their business model? Can we all hurt advertisers by setting up a website like t…

I know little about the ad business but the insinuation I've heard is that the advertisers don't want those impressions, but struggle to block these sites for one reason or another. In other words, it's basically a scam.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#216

Post by swasheck »

wlesieutre wrote: post #133
lerchmo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this particular example particularly gross. Recipe's are no doubt a heavily searched category. Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots? does it have to do with the google ads from top to bottom?

> Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots? Something bothered me about this question, and I think it's the way it frames Google's role as being a passive participant. Google doesn't "allow" anything. Google writes the rules and picks the winners. When you search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe," Google's search algorithm goes "Here's a nice webpage with Grandma Betty's life stor…

Seems like it’d be fairly straightforward to identify a post by genre and then weight for terseness.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#217

Post by wolco »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #168
com2kid wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Plain and simple, Google won't rank you without it. Google looks for additional filler when ranking. Otherwise you would see different kinds of sites.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#218

Post by haberman »

greggman3 wrote: post #41
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…

There are definitely sites who's results I wish I could ban from my results. I won't visit them so they are just a waste of space. My short list, thillist, collider, vulture. Also related to SEO I think is every cooking recipe seems to be 6 to 8 large images and a bunch of unneeded text followed by the recipe 8 to 12 screens down. AFAICT it's entirely not related to me getting to the recipe and instead either a patte…

There is a Chrome extension for maintaining your own personal block list: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#219

Post by ip26 »

jedberg wrote: post #127

Early SEO efforts were actually good for the web. They forced you to make your content easier to find and more accessible. But then that became the table stakes, and people had to start resorting to dirtier tactics. Or just more annoying ones. During this shelter in place period, I've been reading a lot more recipes online. Every one of them starts with the person's life story. And I get it, maybe how that recipe cam…

It's good ol' Goodhart's Law, all over again.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#220

Post by pbz »

cookiengineer wrote: post #208
RobertoG wrote: post #20

It 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…

Every time I land on websites that have such content I am wondering why anybody would want that kind of traffic. I mean, don't they have server costs? It's like they own an infinite amount of money bucket that constantly gets refilled somehow. Why are advertisers even paying them for such impressions? Are they so ridiculously retarded in their business model? Can we all hurt advertisers by setting up a website like t…

Seems to me like you have it backwards.

The reason you even got a chance to click on it is because they wrote it that way. If they didn't, it wouldn't be as visible in Google = nobody would see it. When most websites do this (to survive) folks don't have a choice.

Also, advertisers don't pay for something that's invisible.

Post reply on HN