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Programmatic SEO

zapier.com

1–10 of 26 posts

Re: Programmatic SEO

#3
SEO is a dirty, low-down, snake-oil sales pitch.

Back in the dark ages (happy days), SEO was actually a real thing. You would use the HTML meta description, keywords, etc, to set up things which would actually be used by search engines to categorise and rank webpages.

Then gooble came along and decided to rank search results based on: - The number of links back to something, which depended on popularity and longevity, NOT relevance or quality. - Who pays gooble the most. Primarily who pays gooble the most.

Gooble completely did away with actual SEO. So now all these businesses promising to do SEO for other businesses are mostly just throwing links and blurbs on every social media platform (or Gooble Sheets etc), and maybe buying a page rank boost from gooble directly.

Merely adding keywords in page content is not SEO. Not the old (real) way, and not the gooble way.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#4
SEO is kinda dead.

In an honest form it’s “don’t confuse the crawler.”

In its actual form it makes the web worse. Even if you create a strategy that works Google will eventually shut it down.

It’s an adversarial relationship. The search engines want you to buy ads, not win shelf space.

The organizations that can pull off SEO still do it more to suppress competition. It’s not a low cost way to find customers anymore. It’s keeping people from figuring out you can file your taxes for free.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#5
post #3

SEO is a dirty, low-down, snake-oil sales pitch. Back in the dark ages (happy days), SEO was actually a real thing. You would use the HTML meta description, keywords, etc, to set up things which would actually be used by search engines to categorise and rank webpages. Then gooble came along and decided to rank search results based on: - The number of links back to something, which depended on popularity and longevity…

I don’t think meta description or keywords would work anymore. Their problems were the original reason PageRank was developed in the first place. There will always be a very long tail of documents that match a query, so you need some outside information to rank their relevance and value. In fact, spammy keyword-stuffed articles are likely to be better matches since authentic content probably won’t be trying to game the ranking algorithm.

Unfortunately now that Google so thoroughly dominates search, their perverse incentive to rank garbage ad-saturated listicles highly is not mediated by user behavior (to leave). This warning was also noted in the original PageRank paper.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#6
post #3

SEO is a dirty, low-down, snake-oil sales pitch. Back in the dark ages (happy days), SEO was actually a real thing. You would use the HTML meta description, keywords, etc, to set up things which would actually be used by search engines to categorise and rank webpages. Then gooble came along and decided to rank search results based on: - The number of links back to something, which depended on popularity and longevity…

You could just as easily tell it as meta description etc. incentivising keyword-stuffing, and PageRank/'gooble' coming along and more reliably determining quality by a form of peer review.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#7
It's shocking how angry this article makes me. In an era of scummy ad-tech, decreasing search result quality, and explosion of crappy web content, I'd be embarrassed to publish this.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#8

I strongly believe this article was almost entirely generated by a computer.

I talked with somebody at Zapier a few years ago about freelancing for their blog. They said they’d pay me $100 for a first post and after 2 or 3 rounds of feedback from the editor I just stopped replying and lost interest. In hindsight I wish I had just asked for the $100 to see if they’d pay out for something that they thought (in my estimation) sucked.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#9
post #3

SEO is a dirty, low-down, snake-oil sales pitch. Back in the dark ages (happy days), SEO was actually a real thing. You would use the HTML meta description, keywords, etc, to set up things which would actually be used by search engines to categorise and rank webpages. Then gooble came along and decided to rank search results based on: - The number of links back to something, which depended on popularity and longevity…

I think it’s “Google” not “Gooble.”

Re: Programmatic SEO

#10

It's shocking how angry this article makes me. In an era of scummy ad-tech, decreasing search result quality, and explosion of crappy web content, I'd be embarrassed to publish this.

"I'm part of the reason you can't find what you're looking for but I'm getting richer for it, and for now so can you, until the whole of the internet is garbage meant for robots with no value to humans."

Yeah. Not my style.

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