Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about a layer over Google? Take Google's search results and filter them. Any obvious barriers to that?
They are pretty aggressive about detecting that and throwing up captchas.
see user smt88's idea above.
The internet is an SEO landfill
201–210 of 438 posts
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#202I append "reddit" to any query not meant for a productive task. Except now the internet is mostly reddit for me, which kinda bums me out. Especially given the new js-heavy design. In 2019, if I want reliable search about something I know nothing about I must first search on google, then try again with "reddit" appended, then change www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com, then parse through what are often questionable answe…
Am I the only one who thinks Reddit really sucks? It's a cesspool of kiddie memes, shock, ill informed opinion and political posturing. Besides, if I wanted to search Reddit I'd go to Reddit. It being front page for _everything_ I search for now is so annoying.
You have to curate your feed, same as Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc. If you only subscribe and never unsubscribe you will end up in a trash heap.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#203The Internet needs a good non-profit search engine that has no conflicts of interest. It could be funded by a foundation like Wikipedia or by the government like PBS, but the world sorely needs this resource.
Do nonprofits really lack conflicts of interest? Mozilla for example? I have no idea.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#204I'm always at aw at how people can psychologically say SEO is easy. Getting to the top of many SERPs can mean millions of dollars in monthly revenue. If it's so easy, and the author is so smart about it, why doesn't he just take it? It's like people who say 'well of course CRO is easy, you just make it easy for people to check out and check the stats and iterate'. Overly arrogant engineers many times think everyone e…
>If it's so easy, and the author is so smart about it, why doesn't he just take it? The title suggests one possible answer to that question - the author has moral qualms about turning the Internet into a landfill. (Then again, given that this article is itself almost certainly supposed to double as shitty SEO marketing / clickbait, I have my doubts.)
Well every site that ranks does SEO.
So the issue shouldn't be in the methods, but in the end game. Like, what value are you bringing. He could bring value and get a ton of money.
For example mortgage calculators. There are a million. Pick one, and rank it. You'll be making millions while providing value.
Strange he isn't doing it, since it is so easy and all. I mean, whatever his goals in life, a few million a year will probably help push that.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
We expect everything on the web, including our user agent, to be free as in no cost. The only way to pay for the development cost is to sell to third parties aka advertisers. If people actually paid money to develop more advanced user agents there would be a market for them. Why do people prefer free over paid? I think people underestimate the influence of advertisers and underestimate the value of their own time spe…
The guy who posted the story of splicing a 500kW cable wasn't looking for money. He wanted to amuse people and thanks to him we got amused endlessly. The costs of putting things online are $5 per month at Digital Ocean.
> The costs of putting things online are $5 per month at Digital Ocean.
Plus the knowledge you can, and non-trivial technical expertise like: registering a domain, DNS configuration, setting up web software (even if "one click"), and maintaining it over time.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#206Search 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've been lamenting this demise of Google over the last year or two, but it's been especially foul the last few months. Similar to your biking anecdote, I was trying to find any simple trouble shooting help for a home coffee brewer that suddenly stopped working. I couldn't find any results in the first 4-5 pages that weren't trying to sell me a new machine. The manufacturer is also partly to blame, because I couldn't…
I find that hard to believe. I used the phrase "home coffee brewer stopped working" just now in Google and see nothing but troubleshooting articles and forums from the very first result onward.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Commerce -> revenues -> viable businesses -> sustainable jobs -> peaceful livelihood prospects. No commerce -> no jobs -> unrest -> violence and wars (citation: centuries of human history). Maybe, commerce is the nail which constrains humanity both in a good and a bad sense - by providing a peaceful alternative to violent lifestyles and by creating a consumerist culture?
> (citation: centuries of human history) That’s not a citation. And given your thesis is a sprawling abstract claim, it really needs some real citations.
It needs some citations if it were an academic reference perhaps. As a response to a comment that is speculating without evidence on the similarity between on our culture and a nailed from, it seems sufficient.
The likelihood for an individual to die by violence has been much greater for most of human history and prosperity and peace typically go hand in hand. I could provide references for these claims, but I think they are well known and references for the counter claim haven't been provided.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#208I'm always at aw at how people can psychologically say SEO is easy. Getting to the top of many SERPs can mean millions of dollars in monthly revenue. If it's so easy, and the author is so smart about it, why doesn't he just take it? It's like people who say 'well of course CRO is easy, you just make it easy for people to check out and check the stats and iterate'. Overly arrogant engineers many times think everyone e…
The author is annoyed that the game is who can produce the most garbage, not that they think they could personally win at it (or not).
But it's not exactly that. Volume doesn't win in SEO. That's like talking about lines of code and whoever writes more can win as a programmer. It's... an oversimplification that doesn't quite fit.
Are incentives misaligned? Sure. But saying it is easy, while not succeeding at it, just feels a bit... arrogant. No other word for it.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I dislike how sausage is made. You can talk all you like about how bad the mafia is. Doesn't mean being a top mobster is easy. Are they intellectually smart like a brain surgeon? No. But they are smart in ways that brain surgeons aren't. Considering them stupid would be a grave mistake. It also would be arrogant, it takes a certain type of person to see someone else's job and say 'that's easy' when they never practice that job ever, let alone succeeded at it.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." Sun Tzu.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#209The internet is fine (as far as I can tell). The web is an SEO landfill.
Re: The internet is an SEO landfill
#210This is all made worse by the fact that search is a monopoly.
Further cemented by the fact that the company also has a lion's share of browser (about 70%) and mobile eyeballs (about 75%)
further cemented by the fact that the same company also pays those sites for having good SEO with adsense revenue.