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As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

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Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#21

Post by superkuh »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #9

"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscrib…

Your perception is how the vast majority of people see the web. But you're completely wrong about "nothing out there" and "Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed." Just because you're trapped in the gardens doesn't mean there aren't communities of people who never went in them in the first place.

Yes, there's a thick layer of for-profit walled garden crap on top but the actual web of websites (not applications) is still out there and it's bigger than ever despite being proportionally much smaller compared to the smartphone/megacorp users.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#22

Post by robertlagrant »

escapedmoose wrote: post #12
thegrim33 wrote: post #3

This is a meta-level comment, but a technique I've been using for a while now, which I've found pretty helpful/useful, is that if an article starts off with an anecdote I immediately know not to bother reading it. It shows you that the author is more interested in pushing a feeling/emotion/story rather than relaying actual information. They're trying to manipulate how you think about the topic from the very beginning…

There’s more than one reason to read an article. Often the story is the point.

That's true, but not great. "I'm here for you to subtly impute how I should feel about something by bypass my critical faculties" is a poor substitute for people who want to be informed.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#24

Post by bdw5204 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #19
phendrenad2 wrote: post #9

"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscrib…

There's lots of good content out there, but the problem is finding it. A Google replacement wouldn't be any better, because everyone's attention would be directed into optimizing new replacement site. It frustrates me when people say "Google should search reddit by default." The reason reddit is still halfway decent is there isn't as much money in gaming it, but there would be if the entire world was sent to it.

I think the best path to a "Google replacement" is probably to reinvent Yahoo or dmoz. You'd still have to human curate the worthwhile sites through a ton of SEO spam and, if you go the dmoz route of volunteer curators, that's an attack vector for spammers but I think it'd be much more manageable than trying to build an index of the entire web and search it. A new general purpose web directory would also help mitigate probably the biggest harm that Google's algorithm has caused to the web: the death of the "links" page as a standard part of a web site due to sites trying to increase their pagerank by reducing outbound links.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#25

Post by zenincognito »

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents.

Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of revenue every day.

Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.

The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most lucrative channels for ecommerce.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#26

Post by zztop44 »

thegrim33 wrote: post #3

This is a meta-level comment, but a technique I've been using for a while now, which I've found pretty helpful/useful, is that if an article starts off with an anecdote I immediately know not to bother reading it. It shows you that the author is more interested in pushing a feeling/emotion/story rather than relaying actual information. They're trying to manipulate how you think about the topic from the very beginning…

This one might be a false positive. The article contains lengthy first person descriptions of conversations with SEO “pioneers” and reflections on how they’ve shaped the internet.

I’d also question the heuristic in general. Anecdotes serve a range of purposes. And in any case, it’s quite easy to subtly push a feeling/emotion/story without anecdotes if that’s what you want to do.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#27

Post by [deleted] »

thegrim33 wrote: post #3

This is a meta-level comment, but a technique I've been using for a while now, which I've found pretty helpful/useful, is that if an article starts off with an anecdote I immediately know not to bother reading it. It shows you that the author is more interested in pushing a feeling/emotion/story rather than relaying actual information. They're trying to manipulate how you think about the topic from the very beginning…

[deleted]

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#29

Post by w0m »

zeruch wrote: post #17

I cant foresee a scenario where an endlessly growing mass of AI-generated noise, stacked upon itself, will be useful to anyone. Humans will invariably find a less contentious path (maybe its seeking out more localized options, maybe its balkanizing into various specialized domains, maybe its $NEWTHINGYETTOBESEEN, or all of the above. But the current trajectory cannot hold. Someone else mentioned the "reverse-takeover…

Eventually; someone will create an index to sort through the AI output and determine what's true/relevant and return it to the consumer.

Call it 'airank' maybe?

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#30

Post by drivebycomment »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #6

The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.

The Internet is more useful than it ever was for a lot more people. It has more information on more stuff, and you can do a lot more than you ever could, and a lot more people benefit from it in more ways than ever. Is it universally better in every way ? No. Could it be better in many important ways? Yes. But hyperbolic statements like "the Internet was ruined" is just nostalgia and hyperbole.
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