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The internet is an SEO landfill

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Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#81

Post by jacques_chester »

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…

> 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.

And here I just thought people were basically self-absorbed wankers.

My most recent impression:

"I first learned about this recipe from my dog's aunt who was a lenape indian during the pre-cambrian era and she something something memories of childhood blah blah dinosaur steaks yap yap tedious digression on gritty herbs fluff fluff and so I was talking to my local grocer who put me onto an organic vegan gluten free biomagnetic interspordidial hyperflorpic gmo-free meg-free bpa-free taste-free free-free that reminded me of the time that..."

JUST FUCKING TELL ME HOW TO COOK THE BEANS JANET

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#82

Post by dheera »

brianpgordon wrote: post #71
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.

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. A…

You could do a couple of things:

* Make your upvotes only influence your own search results, and other users like you (similar search history, similar geography, similar past upvote pattern). The fraudster upvoters would just improve SEO for their own fraudster circle. They would see their fraud-upvoted site as #1 within their own circle but it wouldn't change the ranking for me. The programmer circle gets programmer-vetted results on technical help. You know they are a programmer from their search history.

* Sites begging to upvote get a massive SEO hit of -10000 downvotes. Google's NLP should be good enough for this already.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#83

Post by corodra »

dheera wrote: post #54
corodra wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

In my experience, ebook cookbooks get annoying when you have dirty fingers and the screen goes dark because you forgot to switch it back to always on. And there's a great tendency that the recipe is always fucking formatted so you have to scroll more or "turn the page". Cookbooks, at least the ones I own, are all formatted so you never have to turn the page. Seems silly, but that's important.

Yeah library, to check if you want to buy it or just write down a handful of recipes.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#84

Post by swayvil »

Filter out all commerce-related results.

It would be the same as a spam-filter, right? A pattern-identifier.

Google obviously wouldn't do it so we'll create a layer over Google, like LMGTFY does.

This seems obvious to me so I'm probably missing something.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#85

Post by jacques_chester »

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.

Google used to do this, but removed it at some point. As others have noted the same effect is achieveable with browser extensions.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#86

Post by com2kid »

dheera wrote: post #54
corodra wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

The flip side of this is that the cookbooks rarely have super niche recipes. Even some of the highest rated "authentic" cookbooks have the flavor level tuned way down to be more "suitable for American tastes".

The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Or even better, recipes going through Google Translate.

(Or get a multi-lingual friend... :) )

Cook's Illustrated also does some 100% legit international recipes, they are smart enough to A/B test against the country of origin and try to match up the flavor profile with ingredients that are available in America, which can be more work than just directly translating to "closest cultivar of a plant".

I've also enjoyed the organic explosion of low carb cooking that has happened online. I have been witness to the community growing from its very beginnings less than a decade ago when it was just some people trying to make weight loss taste good, to professional level chefs jumping in with their recipes. It is now possible to source low-carb recipes online that can go toe to toe with any other genre of food (e.g. https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/chocolate-hazelnut-sandwic...).

Of course there is also an explosion of low-carb blog spam. Ugh. I do sometimes miss when everyone in the community was there because they loved just trying new things out and sharing their experiences. The same SEO problems exist...

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#88

Post by jacques_chester »

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.

> And yet, this site had two pages made — I suspect — primarily for SEO purposes: Mailchimp Alternative and Sendgrid Alternative.

The author opens with exactly that gripe:

> I have a product that can be explained in one or two sentences. It is fairly well documented. Yet i’m being asked to write 4,000 word articles describing and comparing my product with the competition. Why? Because SEO.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#89

Post by dheera »

com2kid wrote: post #86
dheera wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

The flip side of this is that the cookbooks rarely have super niche recipes. Even some of the highest rated "authentic" cookbooks have the flavor level tuned way down to be more "suitable for American tastes". The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Or even better, recipes going through Google Translate. (Or get a multi-lingual friend... :) ) Cook's Illustrated also does some 100% legit inter…

> The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos.

Yeah I love those. The "random grandma with a gopro" tutorials always work, modulo language barrier. The video editing is crap and you sometimes have to keep fast forwarding while stuff is cooking but the recipes are good.

Re: The internet is an SEO landfill

#90

Post by toast0 »

corodra wrote: post #39

Question, and seo is not my field of expertise at all. Doesn't it seem odd that an seo consultant says to pay for search result ads? In my mind, the point of seo is not to pay "per click". You may pay for a great article to be written, and pay for it to be on a site, which is fair to me. But I then expect it to be noticed because of it's own merits, quality of writing and quality of "publisher". If you also have to p…

If you're paying an SEO consultant, you are probably wanting more traffic, SEM is going to get you more traffic, possibly at higher cost, but also in a much easier to count way.

Way back when, I worked at a travel information site that put a lot of effort into SEO and SEM. For SEO, it was mostly trying to make sure important terms showed up on the page importantly, and making sure our internal linking was using useful links, and some light link exchange with quality sites. We were never able to pinpoint any changes with results, though.

SEM was pretty much pure arbitrage -- find the pages that make the most $/pageview, find keywords that are relevant, bid so we make whatever margin the corporate overlords require. This was all easy to track and very actionable -- if keywords did well, increase the spend, if not, turn it down. We presumably got some non-trackable benefits from exposure, assuming some people who clicked through our pages would come back and use our site some more later.

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