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A glitch in the SEO matrix

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Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#191

Post by lelanthran »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #23

The root cause of all this madness: Ads. As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse. A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there…

> The root cause of all this madness:

> Ads.

> As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse.

Search will only get worse for google users, not for google or google customers.

Google can easily produce only quality search results, by penalising a result by the number of ads it serves.

They don't do this.

They can identify the SEO people and companies, and heavily penalise their clients.

They don't do this either.

They can, because you're logged in, allow you to maintain a blacklist. They don't.

Trust me, for google this is an easy problem to solve; it's just that, for google, this is not a problem, but works as intended behaviour.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#193

Post by taurath »

codegeek wrote: post #4

You 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…

The alternative is places where people congregate. Google used to be a great place to find relatively objective information, but being ad driven it’s all gone to commercial advertising. Word of mouth (IE searching with “[…] Reddit”) gives far better information.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#194

Post by strken »

NegativeK wrote: post #113
chongli wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is a pretty decent, manually curated repository of encyclopedic information. Google search gets worse and worse every year but Wikipedia is pretty stable over time. Sure, it has its own problems with edit wars and editor politics, but compared to the cesspool of SEO spam on Google, Wikipedia is an information paradise.

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…

It's less about Wikipedia itself and more about its citations. Is Wikipedia sufficient to find nearly any important[0] information if you follow hyperlinks, or if you also look up physical references? What are the characteristics of the information that's missing? How long can you avoid Google for if you go along the chain of citations and links?

[0] objectively quantifying importance is an entirely different can of worms, but people know what's important to them

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#195

Post by em500 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #175
samwillis wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

Even with all that data/information, Google still cannot find a more sustainable business model. Despite the countless number of sustinable businesses humanity has produced, so-called "tech" companies just cannot find one. These are not creative people. "We'll just keep on playing eavesdropping intermediary ("middleman") until we have undermined every business, every government and society along with it." Sounds grea…

Advertising is in itself a sustainable business model, hovering around 1% of US GDP for the past century[1] (p.37 figure 3). Google really just needs to defend their position within the ad market to remain sustainable.

[1] https://www.bea.gov/index.php/system/files/papers/WP2017-9.p...

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#196

Post by timwis »

What perplexes me is how these sites make it to the _front page._ Isn't ranking heavily informed by the number of sites that link to the page in question, and the reputation of those sites? I would imagine that the only sites linking to these spam pages are other spam sites run by the same owner (and, of course, google.com), which themselves should have low reputations. Does "exact match" really outweigh reputation scores that much?

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#197

Post by Sander_Marechal »

nine_k wrote: post #182
drdaeman wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't know this? Of course they do, but people pay crazy money for this and it plays the important role in Google's market valuation, so it's in Google's best interests to continue chanting the Big Data Big Money mantra. It doesn't help that the myth/meme is strongly backed by the whole cyberpunk genre, as people love the dystopian themes of "big corporations know everything about you, down to your most secret…

If online ad campaigns did not bring sales, a lot of people would stop doing them. There are other advertisement media; there is organic-looking product placement, there is overt product placement and "influencers", etc. Still, people buy a lot of AdWords and similar, and occasionally I see a relevant ad I click. BTW ads within Facebook are usually of much better quality (for me as a reader), likely because they can…

> If online ad campaigns did not bring sales, a lot of people would stop doing them.

I've done the math on this for a few small companies. I an thoroughly convinced that this is just not true for many companies. The vast amount of sales attributed to online ad campaigns are sales that a company would have gotten anyway even without the ads.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#198

Post by Aeolun »

timwis wrote: post #196

What perplexes me is how these sites make it to the _front page._ Isn't ranking heavily informed by the number of sites that link to the page in question, and the reputation of those sites? I would imagine that the only sites linking to these spam pages are other spam sites run by the same owner (and, of course, google.com), which themselves should have low reputations. Does "exact match" really outweigh reputation s…

What else would you expect? Searching for an exact match and getting wildly different results has been known to inflame some passions.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#199

Post by Aeolun »

superasn wrote: post #21

It'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…

How long until chatgpt injects an advertisement every other paragraph?

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#200

Post by citizenpaul »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #175
samwillis wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

Even with all that data/information, Google still cannot find a more sustainable business model. Despite the countless number of sustinable businesses humanity has produced, so-called "tech" companies just cannot find one. These are not creative people. "We'll just keep on playing eavesdropping intermediary ("middleman") until we have undermined every business, every government and society along with it." Sounds grea…

Id argue that advertising is am emergent side effect of money/commerce. Once you can produce goods for money you need people to be aware you are selling that product.

That being the case unless we stop using money their business is quite sustainable.

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