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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#491

Post by AussieWog93 »

KarlKemp wrote: post #477
DaveExeter wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because they were so much better than the old-fashioned publishers, search engines gobbled up the advertising money No, what happened is that the publishing industry lost their monopoly. They could no longer extract monopoly rents from advertisers. One problem with search engines is affiliate marketing. If Google de-indexed the junk affiliate sites, the web would be much less polluted with affiliate spam.

An "industry" can, almost by definition, not be a monopoly.

It can if there are only a few big players and they're all in cahoots.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#492

Post by bee_rider »

kritiko wrote: post #332
nkrisc wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I frequently append site:reddit.com to searches for a niche search term these days. I think a lot of people who would have blogged or commented on blogs are posting there instead.

I wonder if they'll do a walled garden after their IPO. I've always found the site pretty useless, outside the 'old.reddit.com' version. On the bright side, maybe this will open up space for one of the federated clones to grow.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#494

Post by rtsil »

wyattpeak wrote: post #483
mrkramer wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be reasonable from Google to show how their ranking algorithms work so all webmasters and content creators know how to behave on the web. Now we have black box that's causing confusion and is misdirecting websites and web users.

I don't think so. If the problem is people gaming the system, making it easier to game isn't going to improve the situation. It's not going to put good content creators on a level playing field with spammers, because good content creators simply don't care as much as spammers about search engine gaming.

But people are already gaming the system, and on any search from product reviews to code snippets, I see SEO-optimized spams populating the top results. Good content creator don't have the time or the technical inclination to reverse-engineer the ranking algorithm (or to brute-force by creating tens of thousands of sites and see what sticks in a giant multivariate test).

Knowing the actual rules might give them a fighting chance, since the bad guys already know these rules anyway.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#495

Post by earthboundkid »

DaveExeter wrote: post #467
Veen wrote: post #36

> Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam? Back in the olden days, there were lots of organizations that collated high quality content from the best writers. They nurtured expert writers and paid them well. They fact-checked the content and employed diligent editors and proofreaders so it was accurate and well-written. Over the years, they'd build a reputation for reli…

>Because they were so much better than the old-fashioned publishers, search engines gobbled up the advertising money No, what happened is that the publishing industry lost their monopoly. They could no longer extract monopoly rents from advertisers. One problem with search engines is affiliate marketing. If Google de-indexed the junk affiliate sites, the web would be much less polluted with affiliate spam.

> No, what happened is that the publishing industry lost their monopoly. They could no longer extract monopoly rents from advertisers.

Publishing was not a monopoly. Google/FB are a duopoly. If publishers capture rent from advertisers, they plow it back into content, aka the thing consumers actually want. If Google/FB capture rent, they don’t provide a living wage to content creators and plow the money into buying other startups and whatever “metaverse” is.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#496

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

This explains why running a search engine on the original Google PageRank algorithm would not work as well today as it did back then.

But Google doesn’t run on PageRank anymore. PageRank is merely one of hundreds of signals they use to sort results.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#497

Post by nerdponx »

cblconfederate wrote: post #400
canyonero wrote: post #259

I've been troubled by the just plain awful results being delivered by Google search over the last few years. I think these are just plain hard problems to solve and that Google is not incentivized to solve. Google wants you to click on ads at the end of the day, full-stop. Often times I find myself searching for "best ($product|$thing_to_do)" which I think many other people do as well because we all want the best. Ot…

> So, I like others to use keywords like "reddit" or "forum" to get to real humans who I trust and intentions are not to sell via affiliate links. And therein lies the problem. Reddit makes very little money. Forums probably make negative money nowadays. Google has decided to demonetize the organic internet and subsidizes SEO crap and AMP or whatever dumb thing their signals consider valuable. We get what we incentiv…

Did forums ever make money?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#498

Post by sanxiyn »

mc32 wrote: post #266
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…

Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues: 1. You need to have enthusiastic reviewers (people who care enough about a product category to review them semi-throughly.) 2. Proper reviews can take time and may need domain knowledge. 3. Competition. When there were one or two people doing reviews on some category of products, maybe the economics worked out. Once you have hundreds or thousands com…

One way out is to grow a community of enthusiastic reviewers. LibraryThing succeeded for book reviews. LibraryThing book reviews are better because LibraryThing caters to bookworms.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#499

Post by konaraddi »

A problem is that good SEO doesn’t meant good quality. And assessing quality is hard, so people lean on other people to assess quality (either by appending something like “Reddit” to their search queries or asking friends irl or on twitter/discord).

I wrote a bit more about search engines competition and problems/opportunities here - How Alternative Search Engines Can Win Users https://konaraddi.com/writing/2021/2021-08-05-on-search-comp...

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#500

Post by inetknght »

ajmurmann wrote: post #489
Fede_V wrote: post #476

I think the complaints about SEO spam are valid - but - I think msweibel and pg misdiagnose the challenge. The challenge is that you are dealing with an adversarial system, and, the better your search engine is, the more widely used it becomes, the more valuable it is for your adversaries to find ways to game your rankings. Any new niche search engine will go through a small window of time where they have the luxury…

The main motivation to SEO crappy content seems to be ads and affiliates links. What if you take the motivation away to SEO crappy content by deprioritizing sides that contain ads or affiliate links? Of course Google would never do this, but someone else could.

> The main motivation to SEO crappy content seems to be ads and affiliates links.

Maybe the main observed motivation. But I'd argue that a lot of that is just a fraudulently-profitable front to much more devious problems.

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