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The internet is an SEO landfill

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#241

Post by wvh »

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…

I've noticed the same with song lyrics when I try to find a particular song I've heard somewhere. Hundreds of results of the same handful of "top" pop music industry artists but anything alternative is hard to find, even if the search query very clearly is not a good match for those popular results. I know the stuff I'm look for is out there, but it just won't show up.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#242

Post by marvin-83 »

mokanfar wrote: post #235
phkahler wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Pagerank could be gamed too. Buy expired domain with high pagerank, establish a forwarder to your domain and your domain inherited the pagerank.

I thought that lapsed domains got their pagerank reset (or significantly reduced). Is that not the case?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#243

Post by userbinator »

FutureSpec wrote: post #206
philippoi wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you put in an exact model then I suspect the results will be very different.

The other infuriating thing that's related is if you're trying to find a schematic or service manual, Google thinks you're just looking for the (often useless) user manual. Searching for the user manual does not make it think you're looking for the service manual... it's absolutely idiotic, because who would search for "service manual" but actually want a user manual? Beyond some weird conspiracy theory involving anti-right-to-repair, I can't explain why.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#244

Post by luckylion »

scarface74 wrote: post #63
_mdpn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The older I get the more I realize that there is often an inverse correlation between popular and useful/valuable.

I was “on the internet” before Google and a little before the web became popular when all you had was Gopher, Usenet, and Veronica. The internet was much less useful then. On top of that, without the web becoming popular, there wouldn’t have been the investment in fast home internet or fast cellular data.

Would you have needed fast home internet without the web being popular though? Granted, they didn't look as good, but I know plenty of sites that loaded more quickly 15 years ago when my internet speed was less than a percent of what it is now.

Of course, the past is always rosy, especially when you were young, and new things are always exciting and lose their novelty when you get used to them, but I found the internet much more interesting back then.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#245

Post by 4ntonius8lock »

xkcd1963 wrote: post #115

Protagonist shames people who work in marketing, calls them bottom feeders, low skill workers and spammers. Protagonist’s product offers ‘marketing emails’ service

I'll add to that:

Protagonist is trying to make money selling email marketing services. It isn't working. He wants to make money (it's not a charity)

There are millions of dollars per month to be made in ranking #1 for Mortgages. Protagonist says it is easy. Protagonist isn't making the money that would bring in. But it's easy. That it takes no skill. But he can't make the monies.

Why this article is upvoted is very odd. The article does bring up an interesting topic, there are issues with the incentives SEO places. Just like the incentives that directories placed, anyone remember AAAA Plumbing Services? Or before that, with paying writers per word/line (I'm looking at you books from the 1800s)

Aligning incentives is hard. And it's interesting. But the arrogance of the person who wrote the article is amazing, not to mention the cognitive dissonance he must experience. I personally couldn't get over that to really appreciate the larger topic being covered.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#246

Post by progval »

beefield wrote: post #101

I guess if google was willing to do no evil for a moment and actually think what would make both their search better for the user and www better place overall, they would put a big button next to each search result saying roughly "Hey, dear google. Every thing I have ever seen in this domain is full of crap. Please do not ever again show any page from this domain in my search results" And then use the information fro…

While I would personally love such a feature; there's the issue of computer illeterate people who accidentally click on it for a domain they care about, forget about it, and then have no idea why the google is broken

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#247

Post by avip »

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…

Try google something like "how to do X on Y" or "what's the shortcut key for A in B".

You have to crawl through piles of garbage like a racoon to find the one-liner you were looking for.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#248

Post by luckylion »

beefield wrote: post #101

I guess if google was willing to do no evil for a moment and actually think what would make both their search better for the user and www better place overall, they would put a big button next to each search result saying roughly "Hey, dear google. Every thing I have ever seen in this domain is full of crap. Please do not ever again show any page from this domain in my search results" And then use the information fro…

Won't work: SEOs already send user signals by literally paying normal, average persons to once in a while do a search for something and click on each result until they arrive at example.tld.

The thinking is that Google tracks keywords + clicks, and if people search for "keyword" and aren't satisfied with the info on domain1, domain2 and domain3 (demonstrated by clicking on the next result) but are satisfied after visiting example.tld (demonstrated by not clicking on any other results), Google will rank example.tld higher.

It's not cheap, and I consider it to be more Voodoo than proven fact, and most SEO people are generally more the religious type than the scientist, so they won't run tests. They do it, see that they rank well and continue to do it. I've suggested sacrificing chickens, but nobody listens to me (or they won't admit that they do).

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#249

Post by scarface74 »

luckylion wrote: post #244
scarface74 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was “on the internet” before Google and a little before the web became popular when all you had was Gopher, Usenet, and Veronica. The internet was much less useful then. On top of that, without the web becoming popular, there wouldn’t have been the investment in fast home internet or fast cellular data.

Would you have needed fast home internet without the web being popular though? Granted, they didn't look as good, but I know plenty of sites that loaded more quickly 15 years ago when my internet speed was less than a percent of what it is now. Of course, the past is always rosy, especially when you were young, and new things are always exciting and lose their novelty when you get used to them, but I found the intern…

I was trying to download shareware from various freeware ftp sites (infomac mirror sites). It was painfully slow over 56K dialup.

It took literally hours to download a five minute QuickTime video clip. Streaming audio kind of worked but streaming video with RealVideo was painful.

Surprisingly enough, graphical remote access to a remote Windows computer actually worked decently well over dialup with PCAnywhere.

I think I first had high speed internet around 2002 via FreeDSL and when that went kaput, DirecTV owned a company called Telestream that offered DSL service.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#250

Post by jasode »

swayvil wrote: post #198
Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're missing is the fact that larch search engine companies have no profit motive to do this. They get the vast amount of their money from commercial ad sales -- ads for commercial results. Why would they purposefully castrate their highest paying customers? And if you think the answer is to create and host a new, independent engine, you will be hard pressed to develop a good one, and to find the money to keep…

user smt88 offered a fabulous idea : >Wikipedia is basically an information search engine without commerce or social media. The problem is that your results page is the article itself, and you need to scroll to the bottom to get to an external site. >It's theoretically possible to change the UI or analyze Wikipedia to make a pretty solid search engine powered by millions of person-years of curation.

>user smt88 offered a fabulous idea : >Wikipedia is basically an information search engine without commerce or social media. The problem is that your results page is the article itself, and you need to scroll to the bottom to get to an external site.

Using wikipedia as a data source for a "search engine" does not fulfill gp's (jacquesm) request of "One nice solution would be a search engine that throws out anything related to commerce or linking to commerce."

For example, go to the wikipedia page for the film "Groundhog Day" and look at the external links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day#External_links

- one of the external links points to IMDB.com -- a commercial website owned by Amazon.

- another link points to Punxsatawney Groundhog Club website that's advertising a $30 beer tasting event (Hogtoberfest).

- another link points to a souvenir shop

To continue the example of commercial links, a lot of math articles on wikipedia point to MathWorld which has advertising for the commercial Wolfram Mathematica software package.

IMO, I don't believe a search engine based on wikipedia's list of external sites (even with ignoring the commercial links) is going to be useful for the mainstream audience. I probably do 50+ searches on google every single day and maybe 1% might be answerable from a "wikipedia search". For example, I needed a DIY answer to disassemble a Moen faucet and Wikipedia has zero articles with those instructions. In contrast, the Google (and Youtube) search results has the information I was looking for even though it has the unwanted ads and "content marketing" blogs from plumbing brands.

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