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The internet is an SEO landfill

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#71
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.

I would love for that to work but I'm skeptical that there would be a lot of signal in that sea of noise. We're talking about well over a billion monthly active users; for every HNizen annoyed with the state of the modern web, there are thousands of ordinary people that probably don't mind J. Peterman-esque recipes laden with product placement and somehow incorporating a listicle - as long as they get their recipe.

And once you open the floodgates of allowing user feedback to influence search results, the arms race begins, with every major news site checking the referrer for Google and begging you via popover to upvote their search result, and armadas of malware-controlled botnets being launched to generate authentic-looking feedback, and so on.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#72
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…

I have made the same experience. Funnily enough, I started using the Russian search engine Yandex a while for these use cases. Results are not bad...

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#73

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…

>If it's so easy, and the author is so smart about it, why doesn't he just take it?

The title suggests one possible answer to that question - the author has moral qualms about turning the Internet into a landfill. (Then again, given that this article is itself almost certainly supposed to double as shitty SEO marketing / clickbait, I have my doubts.)

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#74
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.

I fear that would be worse as it would just get super-SEOd with paid upvotes.

This would be good if you could filter using only votes from people you know. Then you could mix in maintained lists like “all active HN users” from various communities.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#75
this article is really something. the author is complaining about the spammy nature of the "Internet" when they are in fact complaining about the spammy nature of search results, particularly those on Google. and yet, the whole thrust of the argument is a complaint about difficult it has been to participating very aggressively in the dynamic that leads to this spammy nature.

if they have a problem with this, they have a problem not with the Internet but with search engines as the primary discovery mechanism of web sites. and if they have a problem with that, participating in the literal exact thing that results in what they are complaining about without reflecting on their own behavior is very odd.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#76
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.

then SEO would turn towards having an army of bots upvoting your product and downvoting the competitor. And if you have something in between to detect bots, users wouldn't want to use it (who would solve a captcha to help optimize search results?) and SEO would find ways around it

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#77
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.

They A/B tested this as an experiment at least once. I recall there was another try too, but couldn't find info about it.

http://justinhileman.info/article/googles-edit-search-result...

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#78
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…

Don't forget the "showing results for Y, click here to search for X" when X is what you actually wanted to search for.

It's ironic that, in trying to make search "human friendly", Google has also succeeded in giving it all the negative traits of a human --- the "human" that is more like a commissioned salesperson.

I know the argument is that humans frequently make mistakes so "we should just show them what we think they wanted", but that's just opening the door for manipulation.

Search was much better when it was closer to a "grep the Internet". IMHO machines should remain "dumb" (for lack of a better adjective) and leave the important decisions to the users, keeping the latter in control.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#79
post #47

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.

I think search engines need to realize the value of raising their results' quality by allowing users to tell them which sites they think are scummy.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#80
> Don’t the makers of Search Engines know this? Of course they do. It’s just not in their interest to bring clarity.

Because they're in a perpetual arms race against spammers. The search engines don't have a choice about any of this.

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