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The internet is an SEO landfill

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#111

Post by robertAngst »

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…

I find some of my top 'competitor' blogs are worse quality, but somehow perform better due to having tons of links/content.

Something like 'Save Money on Food', I am positive I am best-in-class, but I am only front page google, on occasion. Without a doubt, I should be the number 1 result, and instead, well SEO'd mom-science wins.

Btw, does this mean google should be looking for crappy code/design=genuine website?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#112

Post by macspoofing »

Could it be anything otherwise? For any given search term there may be millions of results but only 50 or so will make the first page. No matter what you do, you can't expect to be one of those 50.

We've reached an era when you can't simply rely on the search engine to do your marketing for you. You'll have to do the traditional route of marketing where you take the responsibility of getting the word out on your product.

This is similar to YouTubers complaining when their traffic takes a nose-dive because YouTube tweaked some recommendation algorithm.

In other words, this is what the long-tail looks like.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#113

Post by CodeWriter23 »

Chico75 wrote: post #95
snlnspc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sadly true, but an open source engine like searx could be made to do such a thing

The real cost is in the infrastructure needed to run it unless you go full P2P

Yes, Search could use some Bittorrent-like disruption.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#114

Post by dheera »

vntok wrote: post #102
dheera wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do a couple of things: * Make your upvotes only influence your own search results, and other users like you (similar search history, similar geography, similar past upvote pattern). The fraudster upvoters would just improve SEO for their own fraudster circle. They would see their fraud-upvoted site as #1 within their own circle but it wouldn't change the ranking for me. The programmer circle gets programmer…

What you are describing is a literal filter bubble, where very soon your only exposure to content will be seeing content you are already liking, ideas you are already adhering to, people you are already looking to. A bubble where ideas and people that you and people like yourself don't like automagically get hidden from you so that you never get exposed to them. A nightmare.

I think this can be done a little more intelligently. Up/downvotes should be based on the structure of the site and more so than the meaning of the content.

An downvote should not mean "I disagree with this author" but rather "this site was useless spam" or "I derived no information from this site because it threw 5 popups in my face". Or if I downvote a bunch of paywall sites it should stop showing me paywall sites.

We're looking for a spam filter, basically.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#116

Post by MR4D »

Chico75 wrote: post #95
snlnspc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sadly true, but an open source engine like searx could be made to do such a thing

The real cost is in the infrastructure needed to run it unless you go full P2P

I wonder though - is too much of the P2P universe now mobile devices instead of regular computers that it wouldn’t be feasible?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#117

Post by jeffk_teh_haxor »

jacquesm wrote: post #17

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.

Once the curated list gains critical mass, it sells out, the list turns into garbage, and the cycle repeats itself.

It's happened over and over and over.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#118

Post by Typhon »

codetrotter wrote: post #109
SomeOldThrow wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what happens when you don’t give users control over how search works. The weighting is blatantly user hostile by default because it’s so directed towards people who pay for your eyes. I would pay a massive amount of money for a search engine with a “no commercial results” switch. Of course paid search introduces class issues. I think we should view search like a public utility because it’s absolutely necessar…

> I would pay a massive amount of money for a search engine with a “no commercial results” switch. Yeah but what does that even mean. How do you define commercial? Who is going to go through all of the pages and categorizing them into commercial and non-commercial? And how do you keep shills and “influencers” from littering your results with seemingly innocent but actually commercial content?

Here's an idea : do the 0.1 version by crawling and indexing the web in a perfectly standard way, apply the usual, run-of-the-mill search algorithms, then diff it against the Bing/Google/etc first results which will be biased towards commercial stuff. The higher a page is among their results, the higher the probability that it's commercial in some sense.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#119

Post by swayvil »

jacquesm wrote: post #19
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.

Agreed. Much like a spam-filter. Seems straightforward enough. What am I missing?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#120

Post by rlucas »

theturtletalks wrote: post #21
caiocaiocaio wrote: post #14

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…

So true. Whenever I look up something now I just add Reddit afterwards. It's been working well so far, but I guess that can be manipulated as well.

There’s a reason that works (sorta, mostly, and when it does).

The infrastructure of web navigation and search is foundationally built on textual, first party published content that enjoys some presumptions of good faith authorship: that it was written to be read, by a reader, and meant to be informative, persuasive/argumentative, or recreational/entertaining.

Think: journal articles, Usenet debates, faq compilations, RFCs, product spec sheets, forum postings, IRC logs, ur-blogs, even the original social media content types (tweets, wall posts, comments).

The cycles and epicycles of architecting atop this “real” content gives us mechanisms that reward and incentivize content produced neither for the ends of the writer writing nor any reader reading, but rather in service of manipulating search and driving ux patterns of various darkness.

All the good stuff on the internet is reborn in a spasm of returning to people creating content they care about for other people who care. Then eventually with success it gets polluted into shit with bots, seo, mass media and agencies, influencers, etc.

One silly rubric I use is: could this page / app / venue have been there in 1999? If so it’s probably worth reading. If not, who knows.

(Of course there are cesspools that qualify too, like the chan world and certain subreddits, but there were cesspools in the early days of the web as well.)

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