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The internet is an SEO landfill

docs.sendwithses.com

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#51

Post by luckylion »

joshwcomeau wrote: post #5

Great intro, but where’s the actual article? (Also it’s pretty harsh to say that it takes “little talent” to become an SEO expert. Like all industries, there are charlatans selling snake oil, but there are experts who have invested a lot of time in developing their skill sets, and it’s not nice to be so dismissive.)

From my personal experience with SEO people: the experts make large sums of money running their own sites. The non-experts run around with lofty promises and "consult" for other's sites.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#52

Post by spectre256 »

dheera wrote: post #32

It would be awesome if Google had up/downvote buttons like Reddit and use them to eliminate all the fluff in search results, even if on a targeted community basis. For example if a recipe has no pictures, too many ads, not clear instructions, or no equivalent volume measurements (e.g. "4 grams sugar (about 1 tsp)") I'm likely to downvote it, and those properties can be learned from multiple downvotes.

Its a really nice idea, but I wonder if it would work in practice:

1. Would a significant amount of real humans who actually cared about the content cast a vote (up or down)?

2. Would it be even remotely possible to protect against fraudulent voting at Google scale? (remember they can't even prevent fake business listings on Google Maps, which is at least theoretically closer to verifiable from, for example, business records)

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#53

Post by ksclarke »

saagarjha wrote: post #38
jonex wrote: post #11

It started off strong, nicely illustrating the background leading to this mess, but then the conclusion falters, in particular the accusation of: "Don’t the makers of Search Engines know this? Of course they do. It’s just not in their interest to bring clarity." without any suggestions on what they could be doing to achieve that clarity. To me, it sadly seems like a losing war between the SEO-spammers and the search…

> If The spam is good enough “Good spam” is just real content.

> “Good spam” is just real content.

Harvested and put on somebody else's site that is covered with ads.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#54

Post by dheera »

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…

One thing about cookbooks is that the massive barrier to actually publishing and distributing is a natural filter for credibility; most cookbooks have tried-and-true recipes and are either authentic or a genuinely good adaptation by a skilled chef author.

The internet is full of garbage recipes that either just don't work, inauthentic, and uncreative, all at the same time.

As far as murdering trees go -- let's not forget that libraries and e-books exist.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#55

Post by nitrogen »

SomeOldThrow wrote: post #37
ehnto wrote: post #18

Search results are so heavily weighted toward commerce, products and services because those are the people that can spend money on SEO. It's made the internet, seen through the eyes of search results, seem like an aggressive, shady market bazaar. I try searching for anything remotely bike related, bike community, mechanical information, or just general cool bike stuff and I can't find the human community underneath a…

This is what happens when you don’t give users control over how search works. The weighting is blatantly user hostile by default because it’s so directed towards people who pay for your eyes. I would pay a massive amount of money for a search engine with a “no commercial results” switch. Of course paid search introduces class issues. I think we should view search like a public utility because it’s absolutely necessar…

The original designers of the web envisioned a world where every user could have their own chosen "agent" to navigate the web for them. This is where the User-Agent HTTP header comes from. There would be search agents, data mining agents, and interactive browsing agents.

We missed out on like 90% of what the information revolution was supposed to bring to users, and instead the data giants have captured all the value.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#56

Post by yborg »

hartator wrote: post #26

It’s hard to take this seriously when the author is trying to sell a tool to help send email spam.

The mere existence of a blogpost by a guy complaining that it's a hassle to shill his thing that generates spam on the Internet on the Internet makes the point better than anything written in it - it's almost the pure essence of SEO garbage itself. Whether the irony is unintended or it's deliberate marketing, it's a perfect embodiment.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#57

Post by _mdpn »

dageshi wrote: post #44
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.

The older I get the more I realize that there is often an inverse correlation between popular and useful/valuable.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#58

Post by CondensedBrain »

theturtletalks wrote: post #21
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…

So true. Whenever I look up something now I just add Reddit afterwards. It's been working well so far, but I guess that can be manipulated as well.

Site searching Reddit can at least give some ideas for different words to try. Most of my problems finding things on Google stem from its declining ability to make a reasonable guess based on what I put in. It's not enough to have a word anymore. You have to know the right keyphrase or it shows a whole different world of results.

It used to show its best guess, then branch off from it with less specificity and more variety and, in general, a result reflecting what I meant within a few pages. Now Google is so desperate to get it right on result #1 that it never admits failure no matter how many pages you go.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#59

Post by onefuncman »

agumonkey wrote: post #25
orkon wrote: post #4

I kind of agree, and I think nowadays it's hard to promote a product on the Internet or even get noticed without putting a lot of effort. When the Internet was smaller, I guess it's been easier. Off-topic: the author's product seems similar to my open source tool https://github.com/justcomments/newsletter-cli which allows sending emails via AWS SES

I wonder if the web will saturate and clog, start to cost more to keep up and maintain and lose users that feels walking around and talking is simpler.

this is already true

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#60

Post by scarface74 »

gk1 wrote: post #12

And yet, this site had two pages made — I suspect — primarily for SEO purposes: Mailchimp Alternative and Sendgrid Alternative. Organic search is the highest or second-highest source of traffic for every startup I know. Yes there are too many SEO charlatans, but to ignore such a large traffic source is not smart.

Not every startup. I’ve worked for 3 small B2B SASS companies that have a sales team that went after only “whales” for revenue.

I much prefer that model instead of leaving your business’s future in the hands of Facebook/Google.

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