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A glitch in the SEO matrix

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Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#71

Post by lenzm »

titzer wrote: post #30

After having used computers for a few years (oh, about 30), and having grown up with the internet (first dialup at age 16 in 1996), I gotta say, Access to information should not have (ranked, optimizable, commercially-bent) search as its base interface. This is a cosmic, civilization-level screwup. Not only do you get the decades of SEO and advertising, but the whole system becomes lossy over time. You can't find wha…

What's the alternative? Manually curated directories lost to search. Anything completely manual isn't going to be "web-scale". Anything algorithmic is ranked and optimizable.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#73

Post by nicbou »

codegeek wrote: post #4

You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT…

I add "-best" to my searches. It helps.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#74

Post by jklinger410 »

samwillis wrote: post #50
codegeek wrote: post #4

You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT…

From the point of view of someone who spent 10 years running an e-commerce store, and all its advertising, until a couple of years ago. Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead. The hay day of being able to play the game and make a tidy profit is long gone. Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own prof…

> Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead

And then

> Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane.

Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don't work. They don't know this?

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#75

Post by jklinger410 »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #23

The root cause of all this madness: Ads. As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse. A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there…

The internet as you know it would not exist without ads.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#76

Post by jklinger410 »

arbuge wrote: post #25
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #23

The root cause of all this madness: Ads. As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse. A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there…

No it's not just ads at all. SEO drives traffic. There are many ways to monetize such traffic, and ads are just one. A lot of SEO is driven by local business owners who hire SEO people with dubious track records that make big promises. They invariably clutter up their websites with 10,000 articles along the lines of "best plumber in dallas". It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an S…

> One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.

It's incredibly expensive to rank highly for something. There are tips and tricks to make your site amenable to the search engines, but it takes a lot of time or money to get it to actually notice you.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#77

Post by marklar423 »

firefoxd wrote: post #57

The majority of times when i search on google I'm looking for someone's personal take on a matter. Whether it's a software recommendation or alternative, a recipe, or experience with a tool. Google only has listicles, top x, or best in 202x. I used to search reddit, but the hostile mobile page ruined that for me. Now i go to yandex and navigate through malware to find what i want. It doesn't help that recent trend of…

I think it depends on the topic. On technical / software questions I do still find individual websites and blogs. For something like product reviews, my experience is exactly like yours and the only thing that shows up is the trash you mentioned.

I don't think this is a search problem, I think Google is legitimately surfacing what's available on the Internet for given query. I think this is the dead internet theory at play, and that there just isn't anything valuable to show!

People who would (in the past) run their own website or blog now post that same content on social media, which is why Reddit has become mandatory for people looking for genuine opinions.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#78

Post by mvdtnz »

mschuster91 wrote: post #22
eyelidlessness wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what's the alternative ? None. And gob help you if you dare search for alternative to _____ .

Before the Great Reddit Strike, adding "reddit" or "inurl:reddit.com" helped in that regard pretty well.

Given that the Reddit strike was an almost complete failure it still works well.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#79

Post by _Algernon_ »

dazc wrote: post #66
Regnore wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was removed because it was being gamed from the outset. 'Gamed' as in people would block the most ad-infested pages which just so happened to be the ones which made Google the most money?

No, 'gamed' as in mass blocking one's competitor's results. If you think ads are bad you should take a peep into the world of 'negative seo'. I can assure you that any solution you can think of that will improve web search will be used in the exact opposite way you imagine.

You can allow individuals to customize their own search results without having to use that more broadly.

Re: A glitch in the SEO matrix

#80

Post by OtherShrezzing »

firefoxd wrote: post #57

The majority of times when i search on google I'm looking for someone's personal take on a matter. Whether it's a software recommendation or alternative, a recipe, or experience with a tool. Google only has listicles, top x, or best in 202x. I used to search reddit, but the hostile mobile page ruined that for me. Now i go to yandex and navigate through malware to find what i want. It doesn't help that recent trend of…

I've been looking recently for an opinion article on the Tailwind CSS framework, ideally listing its benefits, drawbacks, long-term maintenance considerations etc. There appears to be absolutely no way to find this type of information on Google these days.
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