Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The internet is an SEO landfill

docs.sendwithses.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 438 posts

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#271

Post by hombre_fatal »

progval wrote: post #246
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

Same reason why turning off wifi/bluetooth on iOS only turns it off for 24 hours. I reckon it avoids an incredible amount of confusion.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#272

Post by hombre_fatal »

nullwasamistake wrote: post #140

I blame Google. They could easily derank sites with paywalls, interstitials, and 4mb of trackers but this goes against their core business. When paywalls stopped being considered "cloaking" I knew the free web was done for Google search. I'm not sure if there's much research on the subject, but in my experience a huge majority of "slow" sites are directly caused by tons of tracking and ad code.

But paywalls, interstitials, and trackers don't mean the website isn't what the user is searching for.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#273

Post by ksangeelee »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #148
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.

I don’t think it’s searching for things that’s the problem, it’s creating things of value. There’s no reason to create a great piece of content if no one sees it. To get people to see it you need to fill it with fluff for google.

The very existence of 'things of value' is what motivated people to build crawlers and search engines in the first place. There are many reasons to create 'a great piece of content', even if nobody else is likely to see it (e.g. for my personal reference, consolidating my understanding, just for fun, etc.). Filling it with fluff simply reduces its 'greatness'.

I think the problem is figuring out how we systematically identify things of value.

My personal feeling is that the solution lies in having good 'seed' URLs with which to build indexes. This might be done using curated lists, as a number of people here suggest, or perhaps through crawling and scoring the content.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#274

Post by quietbritishjim »

x0x0 wrote: post #263
dageshi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If search engines were never invented the web wouldn't be a fraction as useful or popular as it actually is today. I know it's fashionable to hate Google nowadays but come on.

Google search was and is a big improvement, but we could use another couple Panda s.

Pandas?

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#275

Post by shripadk »

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…

This functionality can be misused by your competitor(s)! There already is the issue of companies fraudulently clicking on search and display ads just to damage the advertising budget of competitors. This would only open up another dimension for abuse.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#276

Post by Theodores »

swayvil wrote: post #123

I have the solution! If the domain contains a shopping cart then filter it out. What do you think?

Kind of the opposite. Amazon and other big retailers dominate, sometimes you want to know what other people are selling and to buy from them. Right now there isn't a lot of point in ecommerce as the land grab has already gone.

My idea of a better filter is to rate pages on the quality of the HTML. SEO is never about that and the search engines essentially ignore all the element tags.

If there was an incentive for people to write non-bloated HTML that used all the elements and had proper document outlines rather than just look pretty then I think we could eliminate people who can't do decent web pages, including Amazon.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#277

Post by rchaud »

mythrwy wrote: post #139
lostctown wrote: post #121

I 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.

The front page of Youtube is going to be like the front page of Youtube...full of lowest-denominator stuff like awful memes, Youtuber drama, superhero movies and video games.

But it is maybe the only major site online where you can at least get a real person's opinion on common questions, like recipes and cooking methods, without the fluff of the productized, Adsense-driven sites that exist only to make money.

Case in point: r/gifrecipes. Recipes shown in gif form, so 60 seconds or less. Discussion can happen in the comments, but there won't be any inane babble about how the recipe has been passed down their family for generations. The lengthy pre-ambles on recipe blogs exist only to circumvent Google's penalties for "thin content", i.e. pages with less than 500 words.

Content is being written to serve Google's requirements, not the users.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#279

Post by pixl97 »

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

Well, protagonist isn't wrong... they just also happen to be a bottom feeder too.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#280

Post by Angostura »

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…

To be honest, I just tend to use one recipe site now - BBC Good Food. I ended up subscribing to the magazine since I was getting so many recipes from there. The user ratings on the recipes don't seemed to be gamed either - since there is no incentive to do so.
Post reply on HN