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

The internet is an SEO landfill

docs.sendwithses.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 438 posts

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#11

Post by jonex »

It started off strong, nicely illustrating the background leading to this mess, but then the conclusion falters, in particular the accusation of: "Don’t the makers of Search Engines know this? Of course they do. It’s just not in their interest to bring clarity." without any suggestions on what they could be doing to achieve that clarity.

To me, it sadly seems like a losing war between the SEO-spammers and the search engine developers. There's no law of nature making it possible to separate fake content from true content. If The spam is good enough, I'm not even sure a human can do it.

Maybe the concept of trust-less content distribution will have to come to an end at some point and we will start ranking searches based on more or less manually maintained trust graphs?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#12

Post by gk1 »

And yet, this site had two pages made — I suspect — primarily for SEO purposes: Mailchimp Alternative and Sendgrid Alternative.

Organic search is the highest or second-highest source of traffic for every startup I know. Yes there are too many SEO charlatans, but to ignore such a large traffic source is not smart.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#14

Post by caiocaiocaio »

Google any recipe, and there are at least 5 paragraphs (usually a lot more) of copy that no one will ever read, and isn't even meant for human consumption. Google "How to learn x", and you'll usually get copy written by people who know nothing about the subject, and maybe browsed Amazon for 30 minutes as research. Real, useful results that used to be the norm for Google are becoming more and more rare as time goes by.

We're bombarding ourselves with walls of human-unreadable English that we're supposed to ignore. It's like something from a stupid old sci-fi story.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#15

Post by prepend »

orkon wrote: post #4

I kind of agree, and I think nowadays it's hard to promote a product on the Internet or even get noticed without putting a lot of effort. When the Internet was smaller, I guess it's been easier. Off-topic: the author's product seems similar to my open source tool https://github.com/justcomments/newsletter-cli which allows sending emails via AWS SES

I think it’s possible, it just doesn’t get a lot of attention because the scale is small.

I have friends who run small businesses and just have simple sites and blogs about their customers and they have more business than they can handle. Granted it’s just a living, but it’s almost all traffic through google through organic results.

Interestingly, their competitors frequently have these bullshit, SEO sites that come in below and able their organic results. They come and go but my friend has been around for 10 years.

Customers do mention that they like a “real” site.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#17

Post by jacquesm »

This is a direct effect of using search engines to navigate the web. If we'd stuck to following links curated by actual people (link-rings and other nice inventions) then we'd have never had this problem in the first place. Unfortunately the garbage is here to stay and the good content is totally drowned in a sea of trash.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#18

Post by ehnto »

Search results are so heavily weighted toward commerce, products and services because those are the people that can spend money on SEO. It's made the internet, seen through the eyes of search results, seem like an aggressive, shady market bazaar.

I try searching for anything remotely bike related, bike community, mechanical information, or just general cool bike stuff and I can't find the human community underneath all the fluff articles trying to sell me shit. The internet, as free as it is, has been overflowed with commercial activity. Which pretty closely reflects the real world, but damn that's a shame.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#19

Post by jacquesm »

ehnto wrote: post #18

Search results are so heavily weighted toward commerce, products and services because those are the people that can spend money on SEO. It's made the internet, seen through the eyes of search results, seem like an aggressive, shady market bazaar. I try searching for anything remotely bike related, bike community, mechanical information, or just general cool bike stuff and I can't find the human community underneath a…

One nice solution would be a search engine that throws out anything related to commerce or linking to commerce.
Post reply on HN