The internet is an SEO landfill • Hacker News Board

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#41

Post by michaelbuckbee » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

hiccuphippo wrote: post #27

jormungand wrote: post #8

Unfortunately SEO ruins great, witty and brief marketing texts.

But why is that? Do search engines rank better when a text is longer? Or is it that with more words there's a higher possibility that one will match with what the user is searching? And doesn't it all just make users waste more time searching for something concrete? Maybe there's space for search engines that can summarize a page if it's long and give the user what they want.

It's not really longer/shorter, the core issue is that people don't search for witty titles, they are usually trying to get something done.

In SEO terms the "get something done" is described as "user intent".

Imagine you have written an article describing how to change the oil in a Ford Mustang.

What title better fits user intent:

"How to change the oil on a Ford Mustang"

or

"An afternoon of tomfoolery, broken wrenches and dirty hands with an American classic"

If you are at all interested in people finding you on Google you need to have a title that's more like the former than the latter.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#42

Post by snlnspc » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

orkon wrote: post #23

jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One nice solution would be a search engine that throws out anything related to commerce or linking to commerce.

Then the search engine itself would be probably thrown away :-D

sadly true, but an open source engine like searx could be made to do such a thing

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#43

Post by bdcravens » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

tardo99 wrote: post #6

This is all made worse by the fact that search is a monopoly.

Further cemented by the fact that the company also has a lion's share of browser (about 70%) and mobile eyeballs (about 75%)

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#44

Post by dageshi » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

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.

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.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#45

Post by bdcravens » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

4ntonius8lock wrote: post #29

I'm always at aw at how people can psychologically say SEO is easy. Getting to the top of many SERPs can mean millions of dollars in monthly revenue. If it's so easy, and the author is so smart about it, why doesn't he just take it? It's like people who say 'well of course CRO is easy, you just make it easy for people to check out and check the stats and iterate'. Overly arrogant engineers many times think everyone e…

Dunking a basketball is easy: you just have to jump high enough.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#46

Post by spinach » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:53 PM UTC

It's in part because of the search engine's business model, just like other free apps like Facebook that suffer similar problems where the person who is consuming the product is not actually the customer.

A free product from companies that aspire to be multi-million, multi-billion dollar global companies and are celebrated by those in the tech industry for doing so, even with a 'free' product. The idea of a liberal and free internet and free products with an idolization and celebration of wealth of those same companies doesn't work. We end up with the landfill. We got what we paid for, didn't we (nothing).

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#47

Post by jpindar » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

cottonseed wrote: post #36

I just wish search engines would let me block sites. There are maybe a dozen SEO land grabs in my domain that are trashing my search results and provide no value.

There are browser add-ons that do that.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#48

Post by GraemeL » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

cottonseed wrote: post #36

I just wish search engines would let me block sites. There are maybe a dozen SEO land grabs in my domain that are trashing my search results and provide no value.

I use a user script called Google Hit Hider by Domain that adds this functionality to pretty much every major search engine. Can't imagine searching without it these days.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#49

Post by alexashka » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

There are more general terms for the author describes, it's 'advertising' and 'marketing'.

This is the cost of having a free market - people are free to compete on it.

This is the cost of freedom of speech - idiots get to talk.

You can fix this to an extent with laws - for example you can't advertise cigarettes to children. Just be aware that you can't have it all and live your life :)

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#50

Post by corodra » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

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 live murdering trees.