It's a dark forest out there for keywords.
ha this was my alternate title
A glitch in the SEO matrix
141–150 of 243 posts
Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix
#142It's so weird that Google still hasn't created the ability to block spam domains. I don't think it's a technical difficulty but rather a management decision to allow spam as long as they have their adsense ads and it baffles me they just don't care about their end users at all. I think being a monopoly with most competitors lagging a lap behind can make you this way, but with chatgpt catching up quick, Google better…
I always figured it's because there isn't a real definition of "spam domains". Google can't come up with a set of rules with the right error rate.
Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix
#143It's so weird that Google still hasn't created the ability to block spam domains. I don't think it's a technical difficulty but rather a management decision to allow spam as long as they have their adsense ads and it baffles me they just don't care about their end users at all. I think being a monopoly with most competitors lagging a lap behind can make you this way, but with chatgpt catching up quick, Google better…
I'm talking out of my ass here and know nothing about how search actually works in 2023, but I feel like their search problems really are solvable with their scale.
Like you said, a first step would be blocking spam domains.
Another would be a return to how the algorithm used work, prioritizing results that are frequently linked to elsewhere using the relevant keywords. In the '00s, this was quickly gamed by companies setting up endless blogs to link to their own products, but I feel it could be mitigated by assigning some kind of trustworthiness score to the sites doing the linking. It shouldn't be hard to recognize that a site being recommended a lot on Reddit or some other well established repository of user-generated content is going to be more genuine than "recommendations" from some random blogspam site nobody's heard of.
Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no alternative. People talk about alternatives but everyone I've checked is even worse. Bing, DDG etc. All give complete garbage results. Perhaps not as gamified, but usually that just means you're going to a wordpress of a less competent admin.
Back to webrings! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring (This is a joke (or is it?))
I also think (hope), that reach/scope reduction is a possible counter-reaction as the winner-takes-all empires enshittify beyond repair.
From food to manufacturing to music and other cultural endeavours: making communities small(er) might be an interesting counter (r)evolution.
Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix
#145You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT…
I cant speak for any site other than G2. We have multiple unpaid products that appear appropriately in their lists and quadrants. The question one has to ask themselves, just like in SEO "is my profile optimized" and try work out what their automations expect rather than paying for placement.
Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix
#146You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT…
Is there nothing like ConsumerReports.com for software? A service trying to just write impartial reviews for the sake of the reader?
Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the point of view of someone who spent 10 years running an e-commerce store, and all its advertising, until a couple of years ago. Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead. The hay day of being able to play the game and make a tidy profit is long gone. Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own prof…
> Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead And then > Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don't work. They don't know this?
By "dead" the GP means "at the bottom of a race-to-the-bottom." People are paying $4 (to Google) per customer, to acquire customers with an LTV of $4, making them $0 per customer. That's the natural conclusion to competition under perfect information.
Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia is a barest, insignificant smidge of the knowledge that's available on the internet. Yes, it's incredibly useful, but no, you can't stay within its bounds of knowledge for any appreciable time if you're actually trying to accomplish something beyond falling into a Wikipedia hole. For manually curated content, Google and other search companies were solving that in 1998 because manual curation wasn't feasible…
To further support my argument in favour of manual curation, I would like to ask: why, for the past few years, have people ‘in the know’ been appending “Reddit” to their search strings on Google? Because Reddit is the largest repository of manually curated links, discussions, and original non-encyclopedic information on the internet. People want manually curated information. They don’t want automation which by its ve…
I feel like Reddit is a bad example for an argument against search, because it still relies heavily on search. People aren't finding a specific subreddit for their query and then browsing it until they find what they're looking for, and they're usually not even searching directly on Reddit (because of the poor search quality), they're searching on Google.
What does "manual curation" mean in this context? I think it really just means "absence of spam/low quality content", which manual curation is not strictly necessary for.
Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix
#149Given “a strange game: Almost as strange as global thermonuclear war,” I was a little crushed that the post didn’t end, “The only winning move is not to play.”
Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix
#150You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT…
Is there nothing like ConsumerReports.com for software? A service trying to just write impartial reviews for the sake of the reader?
I've been using reddit for this purpose