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A glitch in the SEO matrix

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Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#221

Post by Name_Chawps »

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…

Is there no search engine that outright bans all commercial content?

There are plenty of searches where I want to find what real people are thinking, not what some company's article says. This kind of thing could easily be crowd-sourced a la SponsorBlock.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#222

Post by Name_Chawps »

the8472 wrote: post #18
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…

> But what's the alternative ? Since ads are a red queen's race, wasting people's attention and assuming we don't want to outright ban them then the next best alternative is to tax them heavily. How about 0.00001 cent per pixel-second-view? Then people will only put up ads when there's some real value in it, not just to keep up with the competition.

Cue the blurry ads lol.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#223

Post by newaccount74 »

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…

> Would love an alternative but there are none

If you are trying to sell a product, I know one weird trick: Just make a product that people enjoy, and they will recommend it to others.

No need to pay for advertising, no need to play the SEO game. The only marketing you need for a decent product is a website with docs and a download button.

This works especially well if you have some sort of freemium product, because then the 90% of people who use the free version still act as multipliers.

I don't know if it works for all businesses, but it's worked for me over the last decade or so.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#224

Post by meetingthrower »

titzer wrote: post #34
safety1st wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize this is anathema to Google, but they could always pay a human being to investigate the domains that receive the most spam reports, and make a decision about it based on human judgment. One wonders how much bullshit might have been solved through a .005% increase in Google's payroll...

Having worked at Google for almost 10 years, I can say that almost any solution proposed that includes "we'll have a person look at this with their eyes" would be instantly discounted as unworkable. The reality distortion field towards automatic everything with computers is intense.

How much review would it take? How many websites until you get to 99% of traffic?

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#225

Post by brucethemoose2 »

renewiltord wrote: post #160
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…

Right. If we didn't have ads, then nobody would illegitimately get traffic to go to their website LOL total crap who comes up with this shit Have you seen a 419 scam? Doesn't have any ads. Just a direct intro to get scammed.

The thing about such scams is that they require input. Somewhere along the chain, a human user with a wallet has to send personal or financial info.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#226

Post by mikecoles »

dmvdoug wrote: post #154
kibwen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back to webrings! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring (This is a joke (or is it?))

Without deciding whether your particular mention of webrings was a joke or not, the nostalgia for them that has been cropping up lately is a little bit puzzling to me as someone who remembers well those days. Because webrings themselves were often full of just pure junk, not to mention broken links, or websites that hadn’t been updated in years but we’re still “under construction” (with the de rigueur gif of a hardha…

With its brokenness, those days were more enjoyable to many. The web was more interesting with the variety. Personal sites were a place for each mouth to speak. Today's sites are a place to be force fed pure junk.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#227

Post by n6h6 »

guerrilla wrote: post #39
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…

> they just don't care about their end users at all. They do, a lot actually. We're just not the end users. The advertisers are. Thet don't need to care about us since they're a monopoly. Use Brave Search, DuckDyckGo or something elae to help change that. Get other people to too.

I tried using DuckDyckGo (lol) for a few weeks recently, but its results are just as bad or worse than Google's are usually. It's the same problem of endless worthless listicle noise.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#228

Post by ivanjermakov »

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…

I use https://alternativeto.org to find tools, might be useful.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#229

Post by NegativeK »

chongli wrote: post #118
NegativeK wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To further support my argument in favour of manual curation, I would like to ask: why, for the past few years, have people ‘in the know’ been appending “Reddit” to their search strings on Google? Because Reddit is the largest repository of manually curated links, discussions, and original non-encyclopedic information on the internet. People want manually curated information. They don’t want automation which by its ve…

Ah. But we're still using some algorithm that's doing curation to even look at reddit. I see you're point about reddit being manually curated via upvotes, interaction, and moderation, but there still has to be something in between to even find the content and match it with what we're looking for. Even reddit's too big to just be a page of links, a la Yahoo.

Reddit has avoided

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#230

Post by nine_k »

jklinger410 wrote: post #218
Sander_Marechal wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The vast amount of sales attributed to online ad campaigns are sales that a company would have gotten anyway even without the ads. This is a simple test. Turn off all of your ads for a year, compare against the previous. Write a blog post about it, destroy the industry.

This has been done, in a way.

Some time in 1980s Coca-Cola decided that they have enough of an iconic status, and they don't need as much advertising on expensive large surfaces. They prudently lowered such advertisement a bit, and checked. Shockingly, they noticed a decline in sales. They reverted to the old policy.

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