How SEO Ruined the Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#291

Post by mcv » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 10:54 AM UTC

ksolanki wrote: post #288

mcv wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even above the article that we're discussing. Hilarious. And a very good demonstration of the problem.

Ok, now that we agree this is neat (I am impressed!), what’s the solution? Google or not, what can help me discover the right recipe, the right content, the right answer to my coding error? Search algorithms that keep “mutating” even randomly? Ranking system? What?

I fear it's incredibly hard to fight fake content with automated systems. You need the ability to understand the content to determine whether the content is actually meaningful. For that, you need far better intelligence than just some fancy text processing.

You need people, basically. If you want to automate it, you need some way to figure out what people think about that content. This has been tried by counting how many people link to it, or rate it highly, but those methods have also been gamed to death.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#292

Post by stevekemp » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

richjdsmith wrote: post #290

stevekemp wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that different cultures are different, but I always think of Americans as being (kitchen) gadget-obsessed. Maybe I've watched too many infomercials and soaps. I've reached a point where I know Americans don't have (electric) kettles, but a scale seems like a necessity for anybody who cooks. (I guess there are lot of people, American, or otherwise, who just don't cook. So I'd understand in that case. But cookin…

Wait, Canadian here, American's don't have electric kettles?

Apparently they're unusual and not at all common.

People seem to prefer to use the kinda old-fashioned manual kettles you place on the top of a stove.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#293

Post by jshevek » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #268

Content today is written for machines, not for humans. There is no bigger turnoff than coming across waves and waves of listicles and "alternatives to" articles that provide no real insight, beyond dumping a bunch of links, adding 1,000 words of nothing, titling it "Ultimate Beginner's Guide to X in 2020" and calling it a day. Sometimes, to find "actual person" content, I'll add "reddit" to the end of my search query…

> that won't be enough, as some enterprising content marketer has decided that they need to rank for those searches too

Would it help your goals to use "site:"?

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#294

Post by seobuddy » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #131

RobertoG wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just searched (1) "SEO ruined content" in duck duck go and this Hacker news page is the first entry. We are very lucky that, as far as we know, an accumulation of irony doesn't create black holes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SEO+ruined+content&t=canonical&ia=...

Currently page 2 on Google. To be fair, "SEO ruined content" is a pretty specific search string and doesn't even show up in the results that out-rank this submission. This comment specifically talks about "SEO ruined content" and is, correctly, a good results candidate.

Very specific indeed, no data on Ahrefs for this keyword.

Keyword Difficulty Ahrefs estimate that you’ll need backlinks from ~17 websites to rank in top 10 for this keyword

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#295

Post by ric2b » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #61

mcv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in." Good lord, yes. If I type two words, I want preference for sites that contain both of them, yet the first results all have either one or the other, because surely I must be more interested in a popular site that uses only one of these, right? Google is sometimes too smart, trying to interpret exact words…

> They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need anymore because you already found it Say you searched for a TV a month ago. Now you're seeing lots of ads about TVs. Stupid Google. But is it? A substantial fraction of those people are returning their TV because something is wrong with it. Now they are looking for another TV set. Sure, the majority keeps their TV. But it is still profitable…

> Say you searched for a TV a month ago. Now you're seeing lots of ads about TVs. Stupid Google.

> But is it?

Yes, because Google knows who started searching for TV's again and who didn't.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#296

Post by ric2b » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

alexmingoia wrote: post #212

kabacha wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does an article have to do both: raise the problem and provide a fix for it? Do you also expect journalists to catch serial killers?

There's a difference between breaking news and lamenting the state of the world. Journalists don't write articles that say nothing but "Serial killers are terrible. I want to live in a world without serial killers." We can agree to disagree. I personally do not find any value in people complaining without illuminating the problem they're complaining about, and seeking or proposing a different vision or solution.

This article is not just whining, it is detailing the ways that SEO has impacted the internet, many of them not obvious to most people.