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The internet is an SEO landfill

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#371

Post by nullwasamistake »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #272
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.

How many of us are actually okay with any of that? I've never paid for an "article" subscription and don't know anyone that has.

Google should provide at least the dumbest notation of "this site is paywalled". What you click is no longer what site you end up on.

I would much rather just see the 99% of internet pages that are free, remove that other shit from my search results. But it's Google's bread and butter so they never will

Oh, poor content farms can't make money that way? Good. I'm fine with my internet feed looking like 1999. The internet was far more useful before it was a medium for a bunch of assholes to make money off "content"

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#372

Post by ip26 »

corodra wrote: post #159
com2kid wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flip side of this is that the cookbooks rarely have super niche recipes. Even some of the highest rated "authentic" cookbooks have the flavor level tuned way down to be more "suitable for American tastes". The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Or even better, recipes going through Google Translate. (Or get a multi-lingual friend... :) ) Cook's Illustrated also does some 100% legit inter…

I absolutely understand what you're getting at. But, I have a reason to disagree. I find cookbooks help expand the cultural horizons to cooking. Only because you can get "authentic" cookbooks of other countries. The Polish ones I have, are in Polish. So, that's easy. The French ones I have, though in English, are written either originally by Frenchies and translated or they also know English and have a good editor. S…

Although the trouble sometimes with "authentic" cookbooks is they occasionally depend on a certain level of shared intrinsic knowledge of the cuisine! That's a tough one to solve on your own.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#373

Post by apitman »

corodra wrote: post #50
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…

Those are the absolute worst. A recipe with someone's jackass life story for 2000 words. You start to wonder if it's even a recipe at all. You have to scroll for a good minute, hoping you didn't miss the recipe. Then come the ads that reformat the size of the page. Everything jumps around and you have to rescroll again. Exactly why I stick to cookbooks in the past year or so. More and more, "fuck the internet", long…

Blame the web, not the internet

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#374

Post by didibus »

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…

Ya, but how do you deal with it? You're just fighting a tug of war. Unless we go hack to curated content or paid, it is always going to be algorithm against SEO in an infinite race.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#375

Post by Yhippa »

Havoc wrote: post #269

It does seem to have worsened lately. Especially the crappy Consent to cookies things that block half the screen with an advert covering the other half. Even with a adblocker and pi hole it's becoming unbearable

You can thank the GDPR for the annoying cookie popup.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#376

Post by flukus »

Yhippa wrote: post #375
Havoc wrote: post #269

It does seem to have worsened lately. Especially the crappy Consent to cookies things that block half the screen with an advert covering the other half. Even with a adblocker and pi hole it's becoming unbearable

You can thank the GDPR for the annoying cookie popup.

99% of these cookie warnings are not GDPR compliant, they offer no option to opt-out and continue reading the site (cookies are not required for a blog post to function and even if they were these don't need the warning) and they opt-in by default, all the tracking cookies are still there no matter whether you accept or not.

Anyone that thinks this is GDPR compliance shouldn't be allowed to touch a computer.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#377

Post by anderspitman »

jacquesm wrote: post #17

This is a direct effect of using search engines to navigate the web. If we'd stuck to following links curated by actual people (link-rings and other nice inventions) then we'd have never had this problem in the first place. Unfortunately the garbage is here to stay and the good content is totally drowned in a sea of trash.

It would be nice if every blog had a "Sites I frequent" section.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#378

Post by [deleted] »

ip26 wrote: post #372
corodra wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely understand what you're getting at. But, I have a reason to disagree. I find cookbooks help expand the cultural horizons to cooking. Only because you can get "authentic" cookbooks of other countries. The Polish ones I have, are in Polish. So, that's easy. The French ones I have, though in English, are written either originally by Frenchies and translated or they also know English and have a good editor. S…

Although the trouble sometimes with "authentic" cookbooks is they occasionally depend on a certain level of shared intrinsic knowledge of the cuisine! That's a tough one to solve on your own.

[deleted]

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#379

Post by Rohccoo »

shthed wrote: post #340
blunte wrote: post #236

Indeed most of the content on the web is SEO fluff or veiled attempts to push an affiliate link. Worse, almost every site has a cookie “preference” popup (when everyone knows the preference is just the minimum necessary cookies), a newsletter signup popup, and a browser notification request popup. Add to that the autoplaying videos that will pop out into their own overlay if you scroll away plus the rotating ads of d…

Is there an adblock which removes these sites from search results?

Check out millionshort.com

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#380

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Is this merely a continuation of the inevitable "Eternal September" effect?

The internet is a reflection of its users. That's why HN'ers tend to look back on 'what it once was' very romantically, because back then it only catered to the technically-minded, the critical thinkers, and so the content matched the demographic.

In hindsight (because I'm not smart enough to have seen it before it happened, and only just smart enough to join the already-joined dots) this was inevitable. Catering to world + dog means anything goes in the pursuit of eyeballs (= sales). Whatever search system is put in place will be manipulated towards this goal.

If a large proportion of the users don't care / don't notice / accept this is normal, then it IS normal.

Television, Radio, newspapers, and magazines are all (predominantly) advertising landfills.

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