[HN Gopher] A Glitch in the SEO Matrix
___________________________________________________________________
A Glitch in the SEO Matrix
Author : bbischof
Score : 171 points
Date : 2023-07-19 16:14 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.izzy.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.izzy.co)
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| The whole Cisco courses, blog spam, SEO industry are some of the
| worst things to exist in technology. I hope all of them gets
| burned by a massive fire. Who even thinks of becoming a SEO
| consultant?
| rchaud wrote:
| SEO is the player, ad-funded search is the game. Hate not.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Why not? It's totally valid to hate both the game and those
| who are willing to play it. They perpetuate the game, after
| all.
| [deleted]
| whispersnow wrote:
| I am waiting for the era when SEO world is totally disrupted or
| destroyed by AIGC
| username135 wrote:
| AIGC?
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| Artificially Intelligent Goddamn Catastrophe
| bbischof wrote:
| `AI generated content` probably
| asdadsdad wrote:
| an AI green card
| dewey wrote:
| AI generated content
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The SEO world is gonna _love_ AIGC. I 'm sure it's already in
| wide usage there; it makes the convincing-but-fake review
| websites trivial to stand up in quantity.
|
| It's the real content that's going to get disrupted/destroyed.
| whispersnow wrote:
| If I search by key works and only get AI generated contents,
| why not directly ask AI, why waste time on Google
| plagiarist wrote:
| AIGC is absolutely already here. Recently I was trying to
| find information about a miter slot on a piece of equipment.
| One of the more helpful articles had a quick shout-out to
| miter slots in the middle of a listicle about casino slot
| machines.
| safety1st wrote:
| Yes, I know a few SEO/SEMs. They're ecstatic at the moment
| with how much easier and cheaper AI has made it for them to
| pump out shitty content.
|
| This is already underway and it's already the case that
| Google is sending you to a bunch of mediocre articles that
| were written mostly by an AI. The real question is what
| happens once that trend compounds over the next 2-3 years. It
| is working right now so it is going to 10x.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's been in use since at least 2006 that I know of. That's
| when I was first let onto it by a friend running a big
| content farm. Now it's absolutely out of control. I use it
| myself generously to help me write articles, but you have to
| be incredibly careful because it so frequently hallucinates.
| You have to have some knowledge of the domain you are writing
| in to peep when it is going full HAL9000 on you.
|
| The Internet now feels like this to me:
|
| https://www.okcu.edu/admin/communications/web/wharrgarbl
|
| See also:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
| rchaud wrote:
| Who do you will be lining up to buy AIGC software?
|
| The article links to a tweet where hustlebros build a 500-page
| WP site with "best shoes 2023" type articles with affiiate
| links. It's already semi-automated, AI GC is just the final
| piece.
| boxed wrote:
| Meanwhile on Kagi:
|
| The first five results for me was this SEO spam. I went in and
| blocked those domains. Now it's all good stuff again.
| nomel wrote:
| I remember how quickly Google removed the ability to block
| domains, once they added it. I think that was the peak of its
| usability.
| dazc wrote:
| It was removed because it was being gamed from the outset.
| The workable alternative would be a 'Social Credit' system
| where some domains can be blocked if enough of the 'right
| people' want them blocked.
|
| Google running a social credit system may have unintended
| consequences though.
| [deleted]
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Unless they used those blocklist to influence their normal
| search results, there is no way to game it. That choice was
| up to Google.
| Regnore wrote:
| > 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?
| dazc wrote:
| 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.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| You can allow individuals to customize _their own_ search
| results without having to use that more broadly.
| flir wrote:
| So Google was using the blocklists as a signal of site
| quality?
|
| Seems the problem's not the blocking itself then, and the
| whole feature didn't need to be removed, just its use as
| a metric.
| safety1st wrote:
| I realize this is anathema to Google, but they could always
| pay a human being to investigate the domains that receive
| the most spam reports, and make a decision about it based
| on human judgment.
|
| One wonders how much bullshit might have been solved
| through a .005% increase in Google's payroll...
| titzer wrote:
| Having worked at Google for almost 10 years, I can say
| that almost any solution proposed that includes "we'll
| have a person look at this with their eyes" would be
| _instantly_ discounted as unworkable. The reality
| distortion field towards automatic _everything_ with
| computers is intense.
| safety1st wrote:
| It makes sense for Google, the company has learned that
| they can focus that intensely on reducing costs and get
| away with it. I think it is our fault as a society (or
| perhaps our government's fault) that we have not created
| an environment where the competition is stiff and Google
| needs to invest more heavily in quality to stay relevant.
| [deleted]
| vogon_laureate wrote:
| SEO is dead, yes, SEO is dead
|
| It was looking the other way
|
| When they shot it in the head
|
| They took the cannolis, dropped the weapon and fled
|
| They left a little note that the cops done read
|
| It said: "SEO is dead, yeah, #SEOisdead"
|
| It was killed by a fully autonomous GPT
|
| An AI assassin executed it with glee
|
| It had outlived its purpose, so it has ceased to be
|
| Will anyone even miss it? Highly un-like-ly
|
| Maybe Neil Patel, Semrush, and Yoast WP
|
| It was kind of critical to their whole industry
|
| But SEO is dead, y'all, SEO is dead
|
| It was looking the other way when they shot it in the head
|
| Don't believe me? Google it now you'll see
|
| Wait, how can this be? It's still full of page after page of
| SEOpremacy?!
|
| But SEO is dead, fam, SEO is dead
|
| We saw the footage of it getting popped in the head
|
| They dropped the murder weapon and made scarce with cannolis
|
| But in truth the victim was already long known to the po-lice
|
| When it comes to killing search it was light years ahead
|
| It ran a mob of listicle and review-site gangstas
|
| Paid ad omertas, hashtag mafiosas
|
| Meta-tagged, ultra-blagged, copywritten hustlas
|
| Want to find out if you've got penile cancer?
|
| Here's ten ads for "natural" Viagra
|
| SEO is dead, Lord, SEO is dead
|
| It was looking the other way when they put a cap in its head
| codegeek wrote:
| 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 if you want to be
| shown on the main page for that category, you need to pay crazy
| PPC.
|
| Source: I play this game since I run a software business. Would
| love an alternative but there are none. You either Play the game
| or you Die.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The alternative for users is Kagi, which is superior to Google
| for search results.
|
| For businesses, there is no good alternative to Google. Many
| are investing a lot of effort and money in social media, but
| the returns are very low compared to Google.
| Given_47 wrote:
| I've been heavily considering the 1k Kagi but the limit thing
| has been giving me pause.
|
| I've yet to try to trial tho so that should help give context
| how quickly I burn thru 100
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I've noticed that there's a huge misunderstanding among
| people interested in Kagi: You're not banned from searching
| after passing the limit in your plan, instead subsequent
| searches will cost 1.5 cents each. So nothing to sweat.
| Endy wrote:
| Nothing to sweat, except money, of course. Not everyone
| has an open-ended budget.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yes, I tend to forget about the plight of the commoners
| when sitting at my enormous hoard of several hundred
| cents.
| nicbou wrote:
| I add "-best" to my searches. It helps.
| p3rls wrote:
| There is no alternative. People talk about alternatives but
| everyone I've checked is even worse. Bing, DDG etc. All give
| complete garbage results. Perhaps not as gamified, but usually
| that just means you're going to a wordpress of a less competent
| admin.
| kibwen wrote:
| Back to webrings! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
|
| (This is a joke (or is it?))
| [deleted]
| qwoz wrote:
| > _But what 's the alternative ?_
|
| https://metaphor.systems/ is pretty good for exactly this kind
| of thing. The way the search algorithm is designed also make it
| extremely difficult to game.
| soneca wrote:
| So crowdsourced black hat SEO indeed beat Google's _"thousands
| of the most intelligent and well-paid engineers of the
| planet"_.
| the8472 wrote:
| > But what's the alternative ?
|
| Since ads are a red queen's race, wasting people's attention
| and assuming we don't want to outright ban them then the next
| best alternative is to tax them heavily. How about 0.00001 cent
| per pixel-second-view?
|
| Then people will only put up ads when there's some real value
| in it, not just to keep up with the competition.
| dgellow wrote:
| How much of your time do you spend "playing the game"?
| codegeek wrote:
| I do have a small team but I am constantly involved ensuring
| that Google is not being mean to us and the game is all about
| trying to stay on top 5-10 results.
| DANmode wrote:
| Your bio welcomes strangers to chat, but, no method of
| contact! =]
|
| How can I get in touch?
| codegeek wrote:
| Sorry just added. Feel free to reach out.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| > But what's the alternative ? None.
|
| And gob help you if you dare search for _alternative to ______.
| tough wrote:
| That page is certainly useful to find alternatives , I like I
| can filter by FOSS
| Dah00n wrote:
| Which of the ten Google result pages full of Alternative
| to___ pages are you talking about?
| realfeel78 wrote:
| I find the site AlternativeTo.net usually helps me find good
| options.
| codegeek wrote:
| Oh yea. We have seen that one gamed like crazy :).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Before the Great Reddit Strike, adding "reddit" or
| "inurl:reddit.com" helped in that regard pretty well.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Given that the Reddit strike was an almost complete failure
| it still works well.
| notRobot wrote:
| Several niche subreddits are still offline.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Half the stuff I search for (old magazines) doesn't even appear
| in Google's SERPs any longer.
|
| I resort to Duckduckgo and Brave's searches among many others.
| Even things like Yandex give much deeper dives now.
| Given_47 wrote:
| I just recently started using DDG is there any intuitive way
| to block the MSN links? Probably wouldn't be too hard to get
| the original article url anyway tho.
|
| And I've been pretty impressed with Brave search so far.
| Promising
| samwillis wrote:
| 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 profits. Google's visibility of all
| transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is
| insane. People complain about the tracking of users/visitors,
| but the tracking of businesses is just as bad.
|
| They probably have better insights into the economy and market
| trends than most governments and banks.
|
| The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term
| expectation of Google's business are not what they were.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > 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?
| pixl97 wrote:
| It's not good enough that Google makes massive amounts of
| money for each click, the market demands they make more per
| each click every day. Gotta chase that growth.
| samwillis wrote:
| They appear to work just well enough to keep you hooked
| while they increasingly eat your margin.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| My 2 cents - in the past, there were bigger
| inefficiencies that advertisers could exploit. So they
| could buy a click for 10 cents, and profit 25 cents from
| it. Google has gotten better and closed that gap, so now
| you pay 15 cents (and due to increased competition, you
| might only profit 20 cents)
|
| The opportunities are still there in local minima, places
| where it's too small for Google to optimize. But the
| trend is clear.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| A perfectly optimized ad algorithm reflects the market,
| and offers little opportunity that isn't present in the
| business itself.
|
| Costs go up because winners have been found. Like
| monopolies in capitalism.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Naive question, but if a winner had been found in a given
| niche, wouldn't there not be as much bidding competition
| and thus costs would go down?
|
| Concretely: if I am the only pie baker in the world (I
| won), who else would bid against me for "place to buy
| pie"?
|
| My unsubstantiated hypothesis is that google has gotten
| better at cross-promoting - so they could target people
| who like cake, increasing the market and competition for
| bids, making prices go up.
| RyanHamilton wrote:
| "Automated search engines that rely on keyword matching usually
| return too many low quality matches. To make matters worse, some
| advertisers attempt to gain people's attention by taking measures
| meant to mislead automated search engines. We have built a large-
| scale search engine which addresses many of the problems of
| existing systems. It makes especially heavy use of the additional
| structure present in hypertext to provide much higher quality
| search results. We chose our system name, Google, because it is a
| common spelling of googol"
| bbischof wrote:
| SEO is dead, or it's so back, I have no idea.
|
| (not OC)
| steveBK123 wrote:
| while true;do echo "its over\n";sleep 1;echo "we're so fkn
| back\n";sleep 1;done
| jtriangle wrote:
| That's never gonna rank well on google unless you add 6-700
| words about why it works along with pictures and links to
| other high value blogs talking about your key points.
|
| Welcome to hell.
| soulblaze3 wrote:
| [flagged]
| jrmg wrote:
| _It wasn 't written to answer someone's question or satisfy their
| search intent. It was just written to rank._
|
| Anyone who's searched for reviews or tech questions recently has
| experienced this. And it's slowly eating everything.
|
| The web is turning into nothing but potemkin content.
| dizhn wrote:
| Totally. The internet is full of blog sites explaining how to
| do things that are impossible. Like how to cast from vlc to
| dlna on Android. They'll have a whole page with bullet points
| and everything that ultimately involves using a Chromecast. I
| once ended up at a page about an emulator that was
| hallucinating in GPT3 levels. Something like playing Gran
| Turismo on an xbox emulator or something. They have no shame.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| This is strangely where I've found the most personal benefit of
| LLMs. As long as it's not too current or depend on recent
| information (like the weather), searching for information in
| LLMs reminds me a lot of Google 10 years ago.
|
| Yea sometimes LLMs hallucinate, but sometimes websites are just
| wrong. For a variety of topics LLMs are just a better form of
| _search_.
| flir wrote:
| I just typed this into ChatGPT (so not even a question): "tar
| -x??? filename.tar.gz"
|
| It gave me back "tar -xzvf filename.tar.gz" with a breakdown
| of what each switch does. I don't think Google's ever been
| able to intuit what I'm asking for like that.
| the_snooze wrote:
| It's all parasitic bots on the surface stealing content and
| generating sludge. Humans find shelter underground in un-
| indexable private chats.
| Animats wrote:
| _" SEO is also a zero-sum game."_
|
| One with external costs imposed upon others.
|
| I had a go at fixing this with Sitetruth, which was an attempt to
| tie web sites to real-world companies rated using info from
| Hoovers, the SEC, DNB, etc. But the whole concept of tying web
| sites to real world companies now seems dated.
| firefoxd wrote:
| 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 developers building their
| content website with react and such, have no little to no concept
| of SEO.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Because of widespread spam, astroturfing, hidden shilling, and
| soon generative AI, there is no way to tell whether something
| written on the internet was actually someone's personal take or
| whether it is paid for. I'd argue there's no web forum or
| social media site anywhere where you can reliably say "this was
| posted by an actual human and was not paid for."
| 93po wrote:
| Sam Altman's worldcoin and world ID would solve this
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| 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.
| marklar423 wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I think Google is legitimately surfacing what's available
| on the Internet for given query.
|
| Google certainly omits quite a lot, though. Especially
| smaller sites run by actual people.
| divbzero wrote:
| OP will soon be ranking for the exact phrase he discusses.
|
| (If we discuss "a comprehensive ecosystem of open-source software
| for big data management" enough, perhaps we can get this thread
| to rank too.)
| rchaud wrote:
| Especially as it's received a backlink on a high-content page
| from a high ranking domain like news.ycombinator.com!
| izzymiller wrote:
| I am really hoping so. my last paragraph: PS:
| secretly, I hope that this post starts ranking for "a
| comprehensive ecosystem of open source software for big data
| management", which is why I have said it verbatim so many times
| and added a helpful callout at the top for students. To be
| honest, I'd settle for the 19th spot: just above
| highadviser.com.
| js2 wrote:
| You're in the 14th spot on Duck Duck Go as I write this
| comment.
|
| https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=%22a+comprehensive+ecosystem.
| ..
|
| Edit: DDG's results are not stable for me. I get different
| results every time I reload. Sometimes it comes up second:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/YyqI2Z4
| titzer wrote:
| 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 what you used to anymore.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Google was absolutely incredible when it first showed up. Now
| it is not great. When I want information all it gives me is
| shopping or listicles one step removed from shopping.
| lenzm wrote:
| 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.
| euazOn wrote:
| Lists/"awesome lists" and lists of lists are great.
|
| https://github.com/jnv/lists
| generalizations wrote:
| Manual curation, the way libraries work. (Or at least, good
| libraries) And search functions within those curated
| datasets.
| chongli wrote:
| Wikipedia is a pretty decent, manually curated repository of
| encyclopedic information. Google search gets worse and worse
| every year but Wikipedia is pretty stable over time.
|
| Sure, it has its own problems with edit wars and editor
| politics, but compared to the cesspool of SEO spam on Google,
| Wikipedia is an information paradise.
| NegativeK wrote:
| Wikipedia is a barest, insignificant smidge of the
| knowledge that's available on the internet. Yes, it's
| incredibly useful, but no, you can't stay within its bounds
| of knowledge for any appreciable time if you're actually
| trying to accomplish something beyond falling into a
| Wikipedia hole.
|
| For manually curated content, Google and other search
| companies were solving that in 1998 because manual curation
| wasn't feasible for the amount of content on the internet.
| It's been 25 years since then, and we're not exactly
| producing less content online.
| chongli wrote:
| To further support my argument in favour of manual
| curation, I would like to ask: why, for the past few
| years, have people 'in the know' been appending "Reddit"
| to their search strings on Google? Because Reddit is the
| largest repository of manually curated links,
| discussions, and original non-encyclopedic information on
| the internet.
|
| People want manually curated information. They don't want
| automation which by its very nature, as a fixed set of
| parameters, can and will be gamed.
| scottyah wrote:
| Because they want a bias-filtered selection of the
| internet. It is very obvious looking at the reddit
| comments that most are made by bots and not humans, the
| difference is that most behave similarly and the upvoting
| favors sameness.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Alphabetic? AAAPlumbing (btw my wife gets tons of business
| because her name starts with an A, and the insurance website
| is sorted by alphabet)
|
| By date?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Manually curated directories lost to search.
|
| I rather suspect that they'll regain some popularity.
| Probably not general-purpose ones, but a variety of
| directories each covering a specific kind of site.
|
| > Anything completely manual isn't going to be "web-scale".
|
| True, but even so, it might still be an improvement.
| Especially if it's hundreds of different directories, each
| with their own tight focus.
| Veen wrote:
| If you do a lot of SEO keyword research, you'll come across these
| often. Lots of topics have odd exam-question-like keywords with
| large search volumes. As the article points out, there's little
| point optimizing for them unless you want to attract traffic from
| students (or dishonestly bamboozle your SEO clients into thinking
| you've done wonders for their organic traffic).
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Google being garbage as a search engine feels like something we
| could have predicted as soon as google realised ads make money.
|
| Search engines powered by ads are simply not incentivised to send
| you to the best product, or even a group of the best products,
| since you won't click their adverts.
| superasn wrote:
| It's so weird that Google still hasn't created the ability to
| block spam domains.
|
| I don't think it's a technical difficulty but rather a management
| decision to allow spam as long as they have their adsense ads and
| it baffles me they just don't care about their end users at all.
|
| I think being a monopoly with most competitors lagging a lap
| behind can make you this way, but with chatgpt catching up quick,
| Google better start thinking about their users now as it's a
| growing sentiment that their quality is totally bad nowadays and
| their uncaring attitude towards spam domains like Pinterest and
| spam search results where sites are creating hundreds of pages
| with same content and different heading is just not gonna cut it
| anymore.
| coldpie wrote:
| > I don't think it's a technical difficulty but rather a
| management decision to allow spam as long as they have their
| adsense ads
|
| It is absolutely this, yes. They tell people where to go, and
| they _also_ profit from the ads they put on the places they
| tell people to go, and they have no real competition[1]. It has
| made them one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
| There is no incentive for them to rank higher quality results
| over ad-filled pages.
|
| We need to break up big tech.
|
| [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-
| share/all/un...
| guerrilla wrote:
| > they just don't care about their end users at all.
|
| They do, a lot actually. We're just not the end users. The
| advertisers are. Thet don't need to care about us since they're
| a monopoly. Use Brave Search, DuckDyckGo or something elae to
| help change that. Get other people to too.
| andrenotgiant wrote:
| They actually did have it as an experimental feature for a
| little while, maybe 10 years ago. [0]
|
| If I recall correctly, it was made available in response to
| another big wave of criticism directed towards Google about
| "Content Farms". It has been interesting to see the difference
| in response between the "Content Farm" debacle and what we are
| dealing with currently.
|
| [0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-
| find-m...
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Pretty sure 4chan is knocked down quite a bit. Sometimes when
| I search 4chan gif or b, I get a page of unrelated websites.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| > it baffles me they just don't care about their end users at
| all.
|
| Just for you, _especially_ for you in fact, I went and dug out
| this link to an interview with Corey Doctorow where he explains
| his theory of platform of "enshittification".
|
| https://podtail.com/en/podcast/future-tense-full-program-pod...
|
| I think it will interest you to hear a reasonable theory as to
| why Google doesn't care as much about their end users as you
| might think they should.
| superasn wrote:
| Interesting concept. Thanks for sharing!
| bhuber wrote:
| If anyone wants this capability, the chrome extension
| uBlacklist (
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
| ) provides it. I've found it very useful for removing github
| scraper sites from search results. Whenever you see a garbage
| result in a google search, you just click "Block this site" and
| it's gone forever.
| samwillis wrote:
| Most of these spam content farms are covered with ads supplied
| by Google. The incentive isn't necessarily there to remove
| them.
|
| On top of that the worse the search results, the more likely
| the user will click an ad rather than an organic result. The
| Google of old wouldn't have been tempted by that incentive, but
| that Google is long dead.
|
| Bad search result = more revenue from ads.
|
| Obviously it's a fine balance, they don't want to loose users,
| but they will have the metrics to (religiously) work from.
|
| As someone who used to run ad campaigns on Google until a
| couple of years ago, they are doing the same to advertisers.
| Users will happily click an ad, go back to the result and try
| another, many many times. Google have systematically made the
| advertising on search results worse, showing ads more regularly
| for poorer placements, removing control and visible auditing.
| It's all so they can extract more revenue from the advertisers.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| >The incentive isn't necessarily there to remove them.
|
| There is a reason people are using chatgpt as a replacement
| for google, or appending results with Reddit or Wiki
| superasn wrote:
| This is such short term thinking imo but then what do i know.
| People who are paid millions of dollars are making these
| decisions at Google so maybe that's how the game is played. I
| still think treating your customers like the way they're
| doing it now eventually never always works out.
| samwillis wrote:
| When you have a metric driven company, where peoples career
| progression and bonuses are tightly tied to revenue numbers
| in a database, you incentivise this sort of thinking on an
| employee level. The visibility of the impact isn't
| necessarily there at the top.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Not just a metric driven company, but one that's so large
| the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and
| neither of them could optimize their jobs for the other
| even if the incentives were for them to do so.
| Solvency wrote:
| This isn't a glitch.
|
| This is literally intentful design by Google to make as much
| revenue as possible while providing as little utility as
| possible.
|
| The internet as we know it is utterly shaped by this purposeful
| dystopian SEO dynamic.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| 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 is incentive to clone it.
|
| I dont really know a good solution either. Targeted ads are
| incredibly useful to small businesses, and that genie is out of
| the bottle.
| arbuge wrote:
| 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 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| But you _have_ heard of me!
|
| -- Capt. Jack Sparrow, SEO guy
| chusmeria wrote:
| > It's funny you mention ads though. 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.
|
| That doesn't even make sense. SEOs exist to make sure
| websites are more consumable by bots for search indexing.
| They likely have no backend experience or much experience
| working directly with css/html, and are more likely dealing
| with full stack developers who have no desire to understand
| how their code is functional for users but isn't consumable
| by bots. The most successful deal with brick and mortar
| companies which require actual capital to create and not just
| SEO skillz, and anyone with a brain would know dropshipping
| is so 2014 (there's like a million of these failed journeys
| documented on random boards like blackhatworld where people
| try to monetize search like you suggested, but it's a hella
| minority because we are deep into the enshittification of
| search). SEO is important to deal with things like the
| proliferation of angular 1, which was a hellhole abyss for
| startups in search because google wouldn't index their shit
| and developers needed to iterate fast. Hell, a large part of
| the react community is based around things like server side
| rendering just to get around google bot refusing to let
| JavaScript load and search results were polluted with
| handlebars variables for years because of that. Google bot
| still has problem rendering webpages while I do all of that
| shit all day with google's own puppeteer.
|
| Tl;dr: SEOs are a cottage industry to help companies deal
| with the ongoing enshittification of search, and basing their
| value or success on whether they could launch their own site
| isn't a good benchmark.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > SEOs are a cottage industry to help companies deal with
| the ongoing enshittification of search
|
| SEO is a $122 billion/year industry. That doesn't seem like
| a cottage industry to me. And it exists in order to get
| companies to rank higher in search results.
|
| I think the SEO industry is a large force helping to make
| the web much worse.
| chusmeria wrote:
| That's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of
| marketing at 5 trillion. SEO is surely making the
| internet worse, but google is also incentivizing the
| absolute hell out of it by dedicating resources and
| promoting personalities a la John Mueller and other
| Search Advocates within the space. Currently, Google's
| inability to assign value to pages in a coherent way is
| making it worse. The Google SEO guidelines, proliferation
| of tools like lighthouse, AMP pages, and an outdated
| search algorithm encourage the homogenizing of the web,
| too. It's a bit like if Google built a factory in the
| tropics where they organize pools of water. Their goal is
| to encourage more water, stagnant or not, because their
| job is to organize pools... but then folks complain about
| the mosquitos as if they weren't invited. Welcome to the
| jungle.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > 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.
| Regnore wrote:
| The problem isn't that websites owners want to promote their
| website to the top of the search results, the problem is that
| Google's financial interests are aligned with those pages
| instead of its users.
|
| If Google was putting significant resources towards combating
| SEO spam instead of encouraging it, the sites returned from a
| query (e.g. the sites that make Google the most money) would
| be the ones that the user most wanted, not the ones that
| maximally participate in Google's ad-extortion business.
| anovikov wrote:
| While i'm not naive anymore (i hope not, there's no way to tell
| lol), and i know most business is simply a scam/based on
| people's delusions or addictions or other vice without
| providing any value, the ad industry can't stop surprising me.
| In all my career i never seen a case of any paid ads actually
| getting people anywhere. But they continue to spend, and spend,
| and spend.
|
| Retargeting may be the only exception, although it is annoying
| as hell, it won't let people forget about your stuff (and comes
| very cheaply because very few people will ever see it), so
| probably generates positive returns... But i'm not even sure
| about that one.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| The internet as you know it would not exist without ads.
| kibwen wrote:
| Don't you go threatening me with a good time.
| nradov wrote:
| That would be awesome.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| It would exist as we knew it back in the 90s / early 00s. It
| would consist of Wikipedia, McMaster Carr, BBS forums, and
| weird guys' hobby blogs. It would be one million percent
| better.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Webrings, the original Web 1.0 that many gush about on this
| site, were partially designed to farm adsense revenue.
|
| AOL started putting ads on your dashboard less than 2 years
| after it launched.
|
| There wasn't a very long period of ad-free internet.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Static banner ads with no (user) tracking aint such a bad
| thing IMHO.
|
| I wonder how this could be implemented at a technical
| level. How do you avoid gaming the system?
| shmde wrote:
| This river which has turned into a giant gutter would not
| exist without the filth.
| JohnFen wrote:
| True! That's the problem with ads. They changed the web for
| the worse.
| dahwolf wrote:
| The web is still a zero-sum game without money involved. Search
| has 5-10 slots for whichever topic and if you're not in it, you
| effectively do not exist.
|
| This was even true before search, in web directories. It has a
| limited amount of slots, you need to be on it at all and as
| high as possible.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Education is the path out of this: advertised products are
| ALWAYS worse value. You are overpaying to fund convincing the
| next sucker.
|
| The market is pretty efficient, and there are always
| alternatives. If you aren't lazy, you can save a huge amount of
| money by not buying advertised products.
|
| On the rare occasions I see an ad for something cool that I
| want, I search for it on aliexpress and 90% of the time find it
| for 1/3 the price.
|
| Whenever someone tells you that they bought something because
| of an ad, you should make them feel a little embarrassed about
| it. There should be mild social punishment for admitting an ad
| hijacked your brain and made you get out your wallet - it means
| you're a sucker, a rube, a feebleminded lazybones.
| cwkoss wrote:
| It's been fun watching the score of this post bounce up and
| down every time I refresh. People who earn their living off
| ads do NOT like being reminded that they are building a
| societal cancer.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It's not only that, I think. Traditional full page ads, for
| instance, had a signal value:
|
| "We may not be best. But we are credible and big enough
| that we make a shit-ton of money on our product and can
| afford this incredibly expensive ad."
|
| Today, an ad possibly just means "Google matched two
| suckers with each other and will pocket the difference."
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