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The internet is an SEO landfill

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#211

Post by Lucadg »

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…

There was a search feature in Google called "discussions" I think. You could find forums. IIRC then same was possible for blogs.

Both were very precious and both are gone. There was no money in them I guess.

This needs to be fixed.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#212

Post by marcosdumay »

jacques_chester wrote: post #81
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…

> 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. And here I just thought people were basically self-absorbed wankers. My most recent impression: "I first learned about this recipe from my dog's aunt who was a lenape indian during the pre-cambrian era and she something something memories of childhood blah blah…

People are lazy and mostly do not want to write a 1000 words essay around the recipe they want to share.

It takes a very unique kind of person to write those things. And those are the ones Google is giving all the voice, while taking it away from normal people.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#213

Post by dreamcompiler »

hedora wrote: post #146
dreamcompiler wrote: post #132

The 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.

Most people forget (or never realized) that the main benefit page rank had over previous search engines was that it briefly bypassed pay for placement. At this point, if search results are dominated by SEO paid placement, then Google search should be as ripe for disruption as the search engines it replaced. I think a non-profit, curated index is a good first step to disintermediating this whole shady (and spammy) ind…

Yep. That was Google in the early days before they got into the advertising business and before their IPO.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#215

Post by [deleted] »

RestlessMind wrote: post #155
swayvil wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our culture is a frog nailed to the floor. The nail is commerce. The frog can still sorta function. Wiggle in little circles. It ain't pretty or healthy or free. No hopping. I wonder what it would be like to not have that nail through us.

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?

[deleted]

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#216

Post by dheera »

brianpgordon wrote: post #150
dheera wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> An downvote should not mean "I disagree with this author" but rather "this site was useless spam" How would you tell them apart? If you could identify abusive site formats mechanically anyway why even solicit votes?

It's still relative. I hate paywalls, some people may prefer to just pay. I hate popups with a passion, so much that I will leave the site, but Average Joe probably just clicks them away.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#217

Post by tarsinge »

phkahler wrote: post #138
userbinator wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the "showing results for Y, click here to search for X" when X is what you actually wanted to search for. It's ironic that, in trying to make search "human friendly", Google has also succeeded in giving it all the negative traits of a human --- the "human" that is more like a commissioned salesperson. I know the argument is that humans frequently make mistakes so "we should just show them what we think t…

Grep the internet and sort by pagerank was great. Then everyone removed links that went offsite. Then link farms. The fake blogs and influencers are the evolution of link farms. Unfortunately sellers will game the system. How do we create a way for buyers to game it?

Maybe it’s time to bring back curated web directories like the original Yahoo?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#218

Post by 4ntonius8lock »

bdcravens wrote: post #45
4ntonius8lock wrote: post #29

I'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…

Dunking a basketball is easy: you just have to jump high enough.

It reminds me of myself and my nerdy friends in high school.

We would say 'being a football player is so easy you just run and grunt, not like us who love math... math is for those who are REALLY smart'.

It took me a long time before I could look back at that attitude and cringe at the arrogance and lack of understanding of the complexities of the world.

The fact that this article is getting upvoted while my comment is getting downvoted is telling.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#219

Post by buboard »

oconnor663 wrote: post #80

> Don’t the makers of Search Engines know this? Of course they do. It’s just not in their interest to bring clarity. Because they're in a perpetual arms race against spammers. The search engines don't have a choice about any of this.

If it s an arms race they are quite the losers. Google s image search is basically unusable for free material. Bing or yandex are way better

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#220

Post by erikpukinskis »

ALittleLight wrote: post #207
erikpukinskis wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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…

It’s just totally ascientific thinking. You’re connecting things with no evidence of connection.

And evidence aside, your analysis is so coarse it’s basically impossible it could be true. Nothing that coarse is true.

And one last point: I have no doubt your head is filled with examples from history that back up your claim. What you almost certainly don’t have is evidence that there isn’t an equal raft of examples that contradict it.

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