Search engines and SEO spam • Hacker News Board

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#551

Post by denton-scratch » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 12:18 PM UTC

mrkramer wrote: post #541

denton-scratch wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making legal software and legal web services SEO is perfectly legal. So is spamming, regrettably. I think Goo no longer cares about the quality of search results; they have other business priorities, so SEO works. Spam is another thing again; we still, after 30 years, don't have an agreed definition of spam. We still don't have a flawless spam filter - far from it. So it astonishes me how much email spam I get prom…

>SEO is perfectly legal. So is spamming, regrettably. SEO is legal but spam is not at least not in US and many other jurisdictions. >I think Goo no longer cares about the quality of search results; they have other business priorities, so SEO works. Google cares about spam but there is so much data and information on the web that it is impossible to figure out what is spam and what is not. Another big problem is fake…

> Definition of spam is unsolicited message

That may be your definition. As I observed, not everyone agrees with it. Most definitions of spam include the word "bulk", for example.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#552

Post by mrkramer » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 2:41 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #551

mrkramer wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>SEO is perfectly legal. So is spamming, regrettably. SEO is legal but spam is not at least not in US and many other jurisdictions. >I think Goo no longer cares about the quality of search results; they have other business priorities, so SEO works. Google cares about spam but there is so much data and information on the web that it is impossible to figure out what is spam and what is not. Another big problem is fake…

> Definition of spam is unsolicited message That may be your definition. As I observed, not everyone agrees with it. Most definitions of spam include the word "bulk", for example.

Bulk unsolicited messages?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#553

Post by domano » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #138

endisneigh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That would be incredibly valuable. They already have most of the tech. They could even create a subscription service around custom search engines if they really wanted. Plenty of people would find something like that incredibly valuable. Why would they do this? Google's customers are the advertisers, not the end-users. And no one is going to pay for a search engine, it's been tried and has failed.

You only need ~1/10000th of Google's revenue to be a financially successful startup. 1/1000th and you'll have a great business, and at 1/100th you'll be somewhere between a unicorn and a decacorn.

"only"

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#554

Post by mrkramer » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

B-Con wrote: post #550

mrkramer wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is transparency worse than smoke screen that we have today? For example healthy and good websites could rank according to good content, good optimization, variety of multimedia content, decent design and UI etc. You can't have too much of good things and qualities. That would be something like writing a too good book or making a too good product.

Because the rank algorithms are subjective heuristics, not absolute metrics. All rank algorithms always have been. It started with the link metrics, then people started gaming that. It's been a signal/noise war ever since. It's also dangerous to ask for the exact criteria because they are ever changing. Google et al don't want to be prescriptive about what a good site is, they want to recognize what a good one is. Yo…

I understand that Google can not prescribe and direct how websites should look like but more transparency on their part wouldn't hurt.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#555

Post by srg0 » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 10:37 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #243

frenchyatwork wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

The original Google algorithm was a clever hack but it relied on web being a hypertext, and links being used contextually.

The algorithm made linking valueable. So instead of writing hypertext people tried to create isolated sites and boost their rank. Remember rel="nofollow"?

Eventually bigger sites took over the small ones.