Search engines and SEO spam • Hacker News Board

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#271

Post by orcasushi » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 6:39 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #243

frenchyatwork wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the fundamental things that make search work well about 1-2 decades ago was that web sites would link to each other, and that those links could vaguely correlate with reputation. There were link spammers, but there was actually a some decent organic content as well. What's happened since then is that almost all the normal "people linking to things they like" has gone behind walled gardens (chiefly Face…

Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.

Average websites goal is now to keep you on them as long as possible. According to some metric folks, the longer you stay on a website the more money you spend there. Linking to another website destroys that metric.

Also if you are going to make a purchase somewhere, any website would try to get a cut of the money you spend by actually sending referral links to the product. So small websites that do not allow this service will not get linked so much.

On a metalevel it is thus that links or connections between items are information. Information is money. And as soon as that became evident links and connections also became more scarce.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#272

Post by jart » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

floatingatoll wrote: post #62

He’s just describing Webrings, except in a reactive tense (“filter out spam sites”) rather than a proactive tense (“associate your site with other worthwhile sites”). Google’s ranking algorithm only works when someone is proactively curating, and only SEO spammers do so these days. Reactive curation is not a viable way to manage information. The simplest way to compete with Google is to create a DIY Webrings site tha…

If I understand correctly, you're saying you'd create an exclusive webring, but the rule to joining is that you have to Disallow: Google, Bing, etc. in your robots.txt file. That sounds outrageous, but speaking as a content creator, I wouldn't be giving up much. My blog gets about 3% of its traffic from search engines. I have no idea who these visitors are or what they searched for, since browsers no longer send referral links. If a webring offered me the benefit of positive regularly engaged community, then having my blog part ways with search engines would be a no brainer. That is after all the Facebook model, except tailored for the open web. Believe me when I say that we bloggers are waiting to be rescued.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#273

Post by heisenbit » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

Affiliate links are environmental toxic waste and it would be only logical to tax such affiliate payments to fund cleanup and mitigation efforts.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#274

Post by freyr » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 6:43 PM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #159

numbsafari wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

Those shitty SEO spam sites exist only to serve ads, and Google has a monopoly on internet ads. So there is no real incentive for them to solve the problem.

Google has 28.9% share, Facebook 25.2%, and Amazon has 10% and growing fast. Not a monopoly, and the incentive is there: if search results are consistently bad, people will stop searching as much, and revenue and market share decline.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#275

Post by propogandist » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

numbsafari wrote: post #117

birken wrote: post #5

The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

>Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos.

you mean the dislike counter they just disabled to force people to sit through more low quality content and pre-roll ads to claim increase in platform engagement and viewership?

The only thing matters is revenue and Google had increases in acquisition costs in prior revenue reports. Expect to see the data points for the latter metrics to be highlighted on the earnings announcement, and a record quarter for YT coming out of the change.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#276

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

Rastonbury wrote: post #164

numbsafari wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

The biggest perverse incentive for Google is that making better search results can mean less clicks to ads (clicking an ad because results are crap, going thru more pages of results means more ads). Clicks are revenue which is much easier to optimise for. Internal Search owners can push for better algos, but what if the algo causes revenue to fall? Are there strong forces strong enough within the organisation to ensu…

The biggest perverse incentive for Google is that making better search results can mean less clicks to ads

This gets close to the real root of the issue -- attention is monetizable independently of the quality of content. There would be much less incentive to create SEO spam if search engines negatively weighted pages with ads and affiliate links, and if manufacturers were barred (e.g. by the FTC) from owning or imitating reviewers.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#277

Post by skilled » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

vntok wrote: post #227

skilled wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is largely because micro-blogging means less content, and less content means you could write five 300-word blog posts instead of one 1,500-word post. I've done blogging for the last 10+ years, and many of those I spent as a freelancer working with startups/brands/editorials. Everyone is after "word count" and I absolutely hate it. Whenever I work on articles for my own blog, I just don't consider word-count at a…

This is a very interesting approach. Do you have traffic data collection on your blog?

I collect post views, but not using Google Analytics or anything like that. I built a pretty substantial developer blog (tips, resources, etc,.) back in 2014. I think it peaked at around 350,000 monthly visitors after 12 months.

Later on, I sold it because I needed the money. Not so much that I didn't want to keep working on it. Unfortunately, the new owners didn't have any idea how to maintain a "healthy" content blog, and it has plummeted down to around 30,000 monthly visitors. All the content they're publishing now is some thin headline-clickbait bullshit.

I even gave them free advice on how to fix it, but I think that for a lot of people, they just don't care and will mindlessly pump out as many pieces of content as possible. And such blogs can be identified from a mile away.

And therein lies the problem with Google SEO at the moment. Even myself, someone who has done SEO work for more than a decade, I can see that results are getting worse. In some niches, the same crappy articles that dominated 6-7 years ago are still dominant today.

I guess we're stuck in time, or so Google thinks.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#278

Post by ColinHayhurst » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #91

To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…

"SEO" spam is "Google SEO" problem. So SE ranking Optimization is not (yet) so much a problem for other Crawler/index SEs (Bing, Mojeek, Gigablast). You might say that Amazon (in eCommerce) and TRIP (in Travel) have cracked the problem of combining good/deep Content/Reviews and Category expertise with Search.

We regularly see partnership opportunities with customers interested in our API [0]. I presume Bing see the same, though their terms are more fixed and require you sharing more data. Definitely big opportunities in other categories, which are often squandered through a naive, if understandable route, of choosing a Scrape and index route.

[0] https://www.mojeek.com/support/api/

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#279

Post by gomox » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #50

gomox wrote: post #6

I believe that the only moat protecting $100B of AdWords revenue is the quality of the Google Search results. There is no meaningful switching cost to using a new search engine, and the spend inertia in ad spend is not very significant (i.e. any online marketing manager will happily spend 5% of their budget in a different search engine adwords-like program if they get better ROI, there is no incentive the be a "Googl…

No. The other moats are lock-in to advertising networks, website metrics, and effective control over Web standards through the Chrome browser. An alternative search platform might provide better search. It would be fighting Google on at least three other fronts. It might have some success, but it would be challenging. (As history largely demonstrates.) Even a rival tech monopolist, Microsoft, barely holds even with i…

I mean, Google is big and it has that advantage like any big enterprise, but the search engine market is very permeable compared to what people traditionally refer to as a moat (say, trying to compete with YouTube as a video hosting platform or with Salesforce as a CRM).

If you have a good search engine, people will flock to it, and search ads will be valuable. That's it. That's how Google became Google.

The fact that Microsoft couldn't do it honestly doesn't mean much. Microsoft also couldn't do a phone OS, a portable music player, and many other things. They have a complex web of conflicting interests that $SEARCH_ENGINE_STARTUP does not.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#280

Post by chongli » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

ijidak wrote: post #258

wodenokoto wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.

Because, years ago, linking to lower reputation sites would drain your page rank. So everyone worried about SEO became afraid to link to anything except: 1) Their own website 2) High reputation sites like NYTimes, etc. It's sad. Makes it harder to navigate the web.

Bang on. Saying that "there isn't anything out there anymore" is missing the point: Google's algorithms created this situation, intentionally or not. Before Google, people linked to what they wanted and communities would naturally cluster around topics of interest. Google came in and made reputation into a currency which effectively destroyed all these communities through incentivizing selfishness.