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The internet is an SEO landfill

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#61

Post by gist »

Let me give another perspective on this from "the school of 'old school'"

Back in the day of yellow page advertising one of the barriers to getting business was placing an expensive advertisement in the yellow pages (for certain types of businesses). I can personally attest to the advantage of doing that. That is I was able to build a business from nothing ZERO sales to over $2m/year using a yellow page ad as the only advertising expense (also used direct mail though). Many of my competitors never wanted to spend the money for a similar ad. (You had to pay for an entire year). It just seemed to expensive to them. It was. That was good though, not bad 'psychological barrier to entry'. Back in the day it was several thousand dollars per month without knowing (the first time) what kind of results you would get.

My point is having to pay that money (and the effort of designing an ad and paying for it) showed commitment to what you were doing (at that time). It's just another way to differentiate from the competition. We were entirely self funded also and took business away from large corporations that did the exact same thing as we did. In the end having to pay for that ad was a good thing, not a bad thing.

I don't know all of google's logic with why they decide who gets SEO juice or not but I wouldn't discount what I am talking about as one of the reasons that things work this way.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#62

Post by swayvil »

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…

Our culture is a frog nailed to the floor. The nail is commerce.

The frog can still sorta function. Wiggle in little circles. It ain't pretty or healthy or free. No hopping.

I wonder what it would be like to not have that nail through us.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#63

Post by scarface74 »

_mdpn wrote: post #57
dageshi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was “on the internet” before Google and a little before the web became popular when all you had was Gopher, Usenet, and Veronica. The internet was much less useful then.

On top of that, without the web becoming popular, there wouldn’t have been the investment in fast home internet or fast cellular data.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#64

Post by luckylion »

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.

No, it's not. Good spam looks like real content, but isn't accurate. It's an article about the most eco friendly kitchen appliance that reads just fine, but littered with factual inaccuracies and exists solely to give the impression that somebody has taken the time to write an actual article on the topic. It's often below GPT2 level, and I'm sure we'll have great fun with autogenerated SEO content in the future.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#65

Post by franky47 »

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.

But then a lucrative business of selling upvotes would be created for people willing to pay (usually businesses) to promote their content. And that's SEO all over again.

I initially believed the "O" in SEO was misleading, as this kind of promotion is not optimisation (at least not for everybody), It turns out it's another letter that's misleading: "S" should be for Sales, not Search.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#67

Post by theturtletalks »

spectre256 wrote: post #52
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…

I don't think it will work in practice. Reddit and other voting platforms require a login to prevent spam voting and do people want Google to know which articles you like and don't? Reddit works because anonymity which Google will not provide.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#68

Post by geargrinder »

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.

Just start using curated link sites instead of google. Make your own curated link site about something you know and care about. Nobody is making you google anything.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#69

Post by dheera »

spectre256 wrote: post #52
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…

1. If the upvote button somehow stuck on later after navigating to the site, I probably would. I realize this would probably make Chrome even more tied to Google in a potentially slightly evil way though, but it might improve search quality drastically

2. I think Google could do it. They're pretty damn good at detecting bots on Google.com just by analyzing whether your behavior looks human or not, and they also have logic in place to detect fraudulent ad clicks. I think they could do a much better job with fake business listing detection but it's probably just not their focus. Search, on the other hand, is their lifeblood.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#70

Post by bscphil »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #41
hiccuphippo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wrench…

On the one hand, that sounds like a good thing, rather than a bad thing. On the other hand, that doesn't match up with my experience at all. There's far too much nonsense out there that sounds like the latter and exists to waste your time.
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