211–220 of 300 posts
If not, someones else will control the stream of inflow, and you are at their mercy.
Getting the customer is always the hardest part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People always adapt to work the system. It's "juking the stats" and IMO the thing that makes it so easy is that computers are great at correlation, but worthless when it comes to cause and effect. Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily s…
> Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Ah, this explains why looking for reviews or comparisons for any type of product returns page after page of fake, single-purpose blogs now. You'd think Google would have wised up to this obvious, annoying SEO strategy by now.
They pay peanuts to freelancing writers that don't know much about the subject, and the only "references" they give for the article is from Wikipedia and other similar blog posts. Since some of those companies have control over thousands of (seemingly unconnected) customer blogs, they can link from one blog to another (and from social networks) to increase their PageRank score.
Some of the larger ones are even starting to employ machine learning to write articles, so expect even less quality from now on.
And Google doesn't care for one simple reason: search keywords captured by Content Marketing blogs are worth way more as AdWords.
I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.
Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.
To some extent, all reviews are like this. I cringe when tech reviewers measure WiFi routers and tell me about throughput (that comes at the cost of latency), or Amazon reviewers bought the completely wrong product and obviously didn't like it.
I hate to say it, but I don't think reviews are "a thing". They make people feel good and probably drive more sales ("it had 5 stars, so I bought it"), but I don't feel like reviews have ever saved me time. I wish I could stop seeing them. (Maybe I should write a Chrome extension to remove them.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to tar…
> Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created . > In the old days we had paid search engines I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engin…
Deep browsing sessions through layers of hyperlinks are dead. Instead people jump into and out of pages from Google, Twitter or HN. Personal home pages are dead, instead you need to publish to a platform like Medium or Twitter which will promote your content for you because no one is browsing anymore.
Now we have a world where the web pages primarily about companies (not individuals) create pages for Google (not people) as a way of juicing the search rankings so they can then get people in to download their mobile app.
In a nostalgic way, I miss the old web. But in a more pragmatic way I'm appalled at how inefficient this system is. If you wanted to design a way to index the world's information from the ground up, using toil and SEO spend as a proxy for quality and legitimacy (i.e. a million keyword heavy custom landing pages and bought backlinks) is a terrible way to do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah...I never use Yelp, because it's so obviously gamed and I know I'm getting bad info at every turn. And that's without talking to small businesses owners in my area, all of which have a tale of shady Yelp practices.
I too would like to know what you use. I hate using Yelp for the obvious reasons, but I don't have an alternative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to tar…
> Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created . > In the old days we had paid search engines I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engin…
I believe he's referring to Yahoo, where you used to have to pay a few hundred dollars a year to get your site listed on their directory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't matter that Google created the monster that is SEO, thr fact is that it exists and it's how most people navigate the web. Google creating AMP further breaks it and gives Google even more control. Google is very much the yelp of the Internet. I understand where you are coming from being an 80s baby myself, however more and more young adults see google as the homepage of the internet, much as many now see Fa…
Google certainly didn't create SEO. In fact their original search engine was notable because the SEO companies had not figured it out and for a couple of years the results were head and shoulders above competitors like Altavista and Ask Jeeves. The only search engine that wasn't ruined by SEO was Archie. It was ruined by everybody shutting down their FTP sites.
Does anyone have an alternative to Yelp. What I care about: - Open Now (Optional) - Sort by Rating - Search by food category, not name of restaurant. Part of the problem is I have a food allergy. I'm highly allergic to soy, so I can't eat all dishes at most restaurants except their drinks. The few I can eat at tend to be very high end or very highly rated, because the alternative to ingredients that use soy is almost…
This article really buries the lede, that all of these restaurants agreed to pay GrubHub for any leads that GrubHub generated. Sounds like the restaurants should simply stop buying GrubHub’s marketing service, if it isn’t worthwhile for them.