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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#311

Post by nradov »

ceejayoz wrote: post #249
nradov wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust DC Rainmaker's reviews of fitness tech products because he always returns products back to the manufacturers after writing reviews. So there's no conflict of interest based on free products. https://www.dcrainmaker.com/product-reviews

If companies don't like his reviews, they'll stop sending review units. That hits both in the pocketbook and the race to be one of the earlier reviewers of a new product. Reduced conflict, perhaps, but not none.

If companies don't send him review units then he just buys them retail. He has already done this for many products.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#312

Post by nkrisc »

ufo wrote: post #251
wodenokoto wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.

There aren't as many blogs now as there used to be.

I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all.

Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#313

Post by visarga »

yabones wrote: post #253
Rastonbury wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest perverse incentive for Google is that making better search results can mean less clicks to ads (clicking an ad because results are crap, going thru more pages of results means more ads). Clicks are revenue which is much easier to optimise for. Internal Search owners can push for better algos, but what if the algo causes revenue to fall? Are there strong forces strong enough within the organisation to ensu…

If I had to pay $10/month for good search results, I absolutely would. I think most people would. Get rid of the ads and spam, and you have a service worth a premium. The solution is to make it user-centric instead of advertiser(spammer)-centric.

Some kind of browser or extension that re-ranks and filters search results on the web.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#314

Post by mrkramer »

streamofdigits wrote: post #185

Eventually search will become a decentralized activity (No, not a web3/crypto/coin type decentralization, I am talking about the useful type). Is there any particular reason why internet search has to have a distorting gatekeeper to the global commons (that pretends playing Maxwell's demon). For chrissake, the stuff being indexed is public .

>Eventually search will become a decentralized activity (No, not a web3/crypto/coin type decentralization, I am talking about the useful type).

People care about UX not about technology remember that unless people are willing to sacrifice good UX in order to have greater security and privacy. These things are tricky and there is no right formula.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#315

Post by wussboy »

chongli wrote: post #280
ijidak wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, years ago, linking to lower reputation sites would drain your page rank. So everyone worried about SEO became afraid to link to anything except: 1) Their own website 2) High reputation sites like NYTimes, etc. It's sad. Makes it harder to navigate the web.

Bang on. Saying that "there isn't anything out there anymore" is missing the point: Google's algorithms created this situation , intentionally or not. Before Google, people linked to what they wanted and communities would naturally cluster around topics of interest. Google came in and made reputation into a currency which effectively destroyed all these communities through incentivizing selfishness.

Surely there is just a different algo that could bring about better communities?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#316

Post by mrkramer »

winternett wrote: post #298
jrockway wrote: post #91

To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…

The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth. There are literally millions of Internet savvy people who would be able to survive on what we would consider barely anything profit-wise in adsense revenue, which also usually pays out in US dollars. In this currently terrible global economy, desperation turns the most intelligent minds bound…

>The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth.

Not quite right because cybercrime aka hacking, cracking, spamming etc. originated in US not in East Europe, Russia and third world countries which are dominating hacking and spamming scene today. Main motivation of cybercriminals is quick money and ease of getting away with it since you are not physically committing a crime but digitally/electronically.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#317

Post by Mezzie »

frenchyatwork wrote: post #145
jrockway wrote: post #91

To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…

I think one of the fundamental things that make search work well about 1-2 decades ago was that web sites would link to each other, and that those links could vaguely correlate with reputation. There were link spammers, but there was actually a some decent organic content as well. What's happened since then is that almost all the normal "people linking to things they like" has gone behind walled gardens (chiefly Face…

Yup, early Google relied on a lot of unpaid , unseen human intervention and choices. I ran some weblinks and curatorial sites during the search wars, and PageRank could only work because there were people behind the sites choosing links based on their usefulness to their audience.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#318

Post by darkwizard42 »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #293
jrockway wrote: post #91

To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…

Search engines are pretty good at solving the problem they were designed to solve, which is "finding pages which contain all the query words". But they are pretty bad at solving the much harder problem of rating the trustworthiness & authenticity, intentions of the owner, monetization of the site, etc. One possible solution to this could be: - Let the community vote on the most trusted sources - Include results from…

Agreed here, but in your second bullet, people have great incentive to write good quality reviews on Reddit, HN, expert forums... karma/recognition etc. It just so happens that these "forums" have built in voting systems that they spend time preventing from being gamed so the search engine doesn't have to.

Not sure if this is a good model for a search engine, but it does work to a small degree in those forums.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#319

Post by Marazan »

Google's ranking alhorithm shaoes the web.

And the web now looks like a 1500-2000 word listicle with 3 images becasue that is what thr ranking algorithm favours.

If you find the info you need and leave quickly that actually down ranks the page. That is is idiotic. Pages that give you what you want quickly are punished!

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#320

Post by going_ham »

jefftk wrote: post #307

I'm seeing a lot of comments along the lines of, "Google shows ads on the SEO-gamed sites that show up in results, so their incentive is to give spammy results". But wouldn't this predict that results would be much better on Bing and other search engines that don't have much presence in the "put ads on random sites" market? (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

> But wouldn't this predict that results would be much better on Bing and other search engines that don't have much presence in the "put ads on random sites" market?

Honestly what I think is every search engine sucks these days, and Google manages to suck a little bit less.

The reason is because how easy it has been to publish low quality content. It's rare to find high quality contents. The issue with search engine is that they don't show these rare contents. These aren't recommended by default. These are hidden.

What happened is the recommendation system is broken! If there weren't any neural networks making decision, it would have been different issue. But with modern search engines deploying recommendation system, I think it is all about rich gets richer scheme. You can't recommended new or fresh but quality content because it was never visited! So, when the entire backend is relying on user data, the system is being fed crappy data because users don't care and those who do are few in number.

As long as system is making revenue, it will be this way. Most people never care at all and would never be bothered because they only care for simple queries. If anyone deviates from the norm, Google search results are pretty bad like every other search engines.

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