
The internet is an SEO landfill - itom
https://docs.sendwithses.com/random-stuff/the-internet-is-an-seo-landfill
======
caiocaiocaio
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.

We're bombarding ourselves with walls of human-unreadable English that we're
supposed to ignore. It's like something from a stupid old sci-fi story.

~~~
corodra
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 live murdering trees.

~~~
dheera
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 forget that libraries and e-books
exist.

~~~
com2kid
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...](https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/chocolate-hazelnut-
sandwich-cookies/)).

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...

~~~
corodra
I absolutely understand what you're getting at. But, I have a reason to
disagree. I find cookbooks help expand the cultural horizons to cooking. Only
because you can get "authentic" cookbooks of other countries. The Polish ones
I have, are in Polish. So, that's easy. The French ones I have, though in
English, are written either originally by Frenchies and translated or they
also know English and have a good editor. Same goes for Japanese, Thai and
German. But I also look for keywords about their grandmother. Best way to know
the authentic level of a cookbook in English is how much they admit they're
stealing from their grandma. The higher, the better. Especially if they talk
about struggling to get the right ingredients.

Honestly, I miss absolutely nothing from the internet when it comes to
cooking. But I also wanted to be a chef. So I studied how to properly cook
long ago and I cook almost every day... so I'll admit in already an outlier.
Still, the way the internet treats cooking is retarded. It doesn't surprise me
that people don't like to cook if they grew up with the internet as a learning
resource. All these people overcomplicate easy recipes and substitute anything
because it makes them feel like pretty snowflakes.

~~~
ip26
Although the trouble sometimes with "authentic" cookbooks is they occasionally
depend on a certain level of shared intrinsic knowledge of the cuisine! That's
a tough one to solve on your own.

~~~
bigmanwalter
It's amazing really. My other half's family is Greek and it took me years to
get the hang of some of their simplest recipes. The whole time they were
saying "It's only olive oil and salt! What can be so difficult?""

------
blunte
Indeed most of the content on the web is SEO fluff or veiled attempts to push
an affiliate link.

Worse, almost every site has a cookie “preference” popup (when everyone knows
the preference is just the minimum necessary cookies), a newsletter signup
popup, and a browser notification request popup.

Add to that the autoplaying videos that will pop out into their own overlay if
you scroll away plus the rotating ads of different sizes which cause the page
content to shift up and down... oh and the fancy morphing page headers that
hang down over the content you’re trying to read if you don’t scroll enough at
first.

The web is currently a shitshow of comic proportions, the likes of which not
even the most cynical comedians accurately predicted.

The desktop app situation isn’t as bad, but it follows a similar trend of
demanding more from the hardware and user (and network) while providing less.

It might actually be better overall if mobile and desktop performance had not
increased in the last decade. I swear the end user experience hasn’t on
average improved even a fraction as much as the hardware capability has.

What a dismal road we are on.

~~~
pdimitar
I still remember to this day the experience I had with the Miranda IM
messenger -- I was signed it to at least 6 services (ICQ, AIM, Yahoo and a few
others). 40MB of RAM during the time when 1GB RAM on an average PC became the
affordable norm, no lag _ever_ , instant rendering, everything works
instantly, plus a lot of possible customisation -- themes, emoticon packs, you
name it.

Same with web. Search for something, get 7 useful results on the first page,
get your work done in minutes. No banners, no ads, no consent popups, no
constant nagging for signups. Just content and some personal expression --
which, while comical at places, is still vastly preferable to the crap show we
are enduring today.

Fast forward 12-15 years forward and I am absolutely amazed how awful the
state of the desktop and the web is. Things are only getting worse with time.

~~~
nine_k
Miranda was cool. I vividly remember it.

I also vividly remember banner ads at that time, there were a few popular
sizes. Some of the first ad-filtering proxies based their blocking algorithms
on the sizes.

When AdWords came it felt almost beneficial, because connections were slow and
often metered.

SEO tricks proliferated at the time (say, 2000), too, of more stupid sorts
because search engines were not that sophisticated yet, including Google.

------
lostctown
I append "reddit" to any query not meant for a productive task. Except now the
internet is mostly reddit for me, which kinda bums me out. Especially given
the new js-heavy design. In 2019, if I want reliable search about something I
know nothing about I must first search on google, then try again with "reddit"
appended, then change www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com, then parse through
what are often questionable answers from anon users, possibly still influenced
by marketers, and then maybe, I get the answer or next lead that I was looking
for.

~~~
mythrwy
Am I the only one who thinks Reddit really sucks?

It's a cesspool of kiddie memes, shock, ill informed opinion and political
posturing.

Besides, if I wanted to search Reddit I'd go to Reddit. It being front page
for _everything_ I search for now is so annoying.

~~~
MisterTea
I was really late to the reddit party and only made an account a few years
ago. Thought it would be a great technical resource... Every time I had a more
advanced question the place seemed to fall flat. You'd go to a very specific
sub thinking there should be some informative people but you come to find it's
full of people in the same boat as you. They wind up guessing or throwing out
whatever to get karma simply being unhelpful. One answer to a question I had
about data recovery was replied to with "your approach is very amateurish" I
reply with "please explain to me how it is amateurish" and get no response.
It's just a big fuck you waste of time.

I tried helping in some subs but was met with hostility. Tried directing
someone to the proper channels (mailing lists) to search for help with a
openbsd hardware issue and I get insulted in return because they didn't like
my answer. And it wasn't a rude "RTFM" reply but an honest helpful post
explaining the mailing lists and how to search and ask. Fuck that noise. I got
better shit to do.

The real purpose of reddit is to aggregate people around faux community to
sell ads. You have nothing but circle jerks and fanboyism but no actual meat
and potatoes. Even after deleting every single worthless default main sub the
subs I try to watch are all "look what I did!". Actual questions are never
answered. It's all about showcasing to get circle jerks going so people can
live vicariously through the achievements of others. That keeps the eyeballs
on the ads.

I find myself going back to IRC where the barrier of entry is much higher so
you wind up with people who know a thing or two.

~~~
friendlybus
There's some discord channels that host good stuff, with communities that like
diving into harder problems 'behind closed doors' so to speak.

~~~
krackers
I've found discord even worse in terms of cliques and meme spamming. And the
closed off walled-garden nature doesn't sit well with me.

------
xkcd1963
Protagonist shames people who work in marketing, calls them bottom feeders,
low skill workers and spammers. Protagonist’s product offers ‘marketing
emails’ service

~~~
el_dev_hell
> Protagonist shames people who work in marketing, calls them bottom feeders,
> low skill workers and spammers

True.

> Protagonist’s product offers ‘marketing emails’ service

Also true.

Would you be happier if the protagonist was an entomologist or truck driver?

~~~
rchaud
A truck driver's indignation would at least be understandable, but you have to
assume that an email blast service has some knowledge about how the sausage of
online marketing is made.

------
nickfromseattle
This is 100% how search engine optimization works, the consultants are
correct.

As a marketer, when I search for marketing information on Google 70%-90% of
the time all of the stuff on the 1st page generally isn't teaching me anything
I didn't already know.

But as someone who does this exact thing, I know how expensive good content is
- hiring an author to write 3,000 words of valuable information for a reader
can cost $500 - $1000 per page. Add another $400 - $1,000 for the consultants
time on that page.

Or you can hire writers that produce lower value information for $30 - $120
per 3,000 words that ranks just as well as high quality content.

The first thing I thought when I saw Elon Musk's writing AI was how powerful
of a search marketing tool this is.

Reducing your content cost to effectively zero gives you a HUGE competitive
advantage.

I know a publisher programmatically generating content and generating millions
of organic search visits a month for marginal costs reaching 0 - they pivoted
to a tech company after identifying their #1 problem was content costs were
too high and ad revenue was too low. Now they're selling this technology to
other publishers.

~~~
pdimitar
What I don't like about your line of thinking is that creating such content
should even cost money.

Knowledge should be free at our point in time and supposed evolutional stage.
But it's not.

I'd gladly donate some local lectures on the stuff I know if I had the time.
But I wouldn't charge money for it.

Knowledge should be free. And internet should have become mega yellow pages on
steroids like a decade ago.

~~~
siphon22
>I'd gladly donate some local lectures on the stuff I know if I had the time.

It sounds like your time is a limited resource and you choose to allocate it
to other areas of your life instead of for the good of spreading knowledge.
Why then, do you think others should give their time away for free?

Not trying to be hostile, just a thought for you.

~~~
pdimitar
No offense taken, yours is a valid criticism -- until you meet 20+ internet
marketers in real life.

There are _a lot_ of very greedy people with a lot of time on their hands but
they choose to try and strangle the internet instead of bettering it. And I am
left saddened that I have a family to support, health to improve, and work on
having my own retirement fund. Maybe start a business or two as well.

Trust me I get it. But currently I have to think of the future and there are
only 14-15 active hours a day.

Yours remains a valid remark. If we want to have useful internet then maybe a
lot of personal lives have to be sacrificed.

~~~
siphon22
I get where you're coming from. But I'm going to offer another perspective.
There is a shitload of content being made on the internet, and I believe you
too would agree the vast majority of content on the web could be hardly called
"knowledge" and are more likely to have a negative effect than good on
society. And it's literally all free, they don't get paid for that, it's just
what people naturally do, and technological advancements have made it really
easy to do.

In such a landscape, how do we incentivize the proliferation of actually
useful content and knowledge? It's not so easy as to just putting words out
there most of the time is it? The content we consider valuable have
significant amounts of time, research, and thought behind them I would assume.
Time is a limited resource, and it is often that the people who have the most
valuable knowledge to offer have less of it while those who post meaningless
crap have the most.

------
jacquesm
This is a direct effect of using search engines to navigate the web. If we'd
stuck to following links curated by actual people (link-rings and other nice
inventions) then we'd have never had this problem in the first place.
Unfortunately the garbage is here to stay and the good content is totally
drowned in a sea of trash.

~~~
dageshi
If search engines were never invented the web wouldn't be a fraction as useful
or popular as it actually is today.

I know it's fashionable to hate Google nowadays but come on.

~~~
ohithereyou
The older I get the more I realize that there is often an inverse correlation
between popular and useful/valuable.

~~~
scarface74
I was “on the internet” before Google and a little before the web became
popular when all you had was Gopher, Usenet, and Veronica. The internet was
much less useful then.

On top of that, without the web becoming popular, there wouldn’t have been the
investment in fast home internet or fast cellular data.

~~~
luckylion
Would you have needed fast home internet without the web being popular though?
Granted, they didn't look as good, but I know plenty of sites that loaded more
quickly 15 years ago when my internet speed was less than a percent of what it
is now.

Of course, the past is always rosy, especially when you were young, and new
things are always exciting and lose their novelty when you get used to them,
but I found the internet much more interesting back then.

~~~
scarface74
I was trying to download shareware from various freeware ftp sites (infomac
mirror sites). It was painfully slow over 56K dialup.

It took literally hours to download a five minute QuickTime video clip.
Streaming audio kind of worked but streaming video with RealVideo was painful.

Surprisingly enough, graphical remote access to a remote Windows computer
actually worked decently well over dialup with PCAnywhere.

I think I first had high speed internet around 2002 via FreeDSL and when that
went kaput, DirecTV owned a company called Telestream that offered DSL
service.

~~~
luckylion
Yeah, I remember the times I didn't dare move because it might kill my
download, back before resuming and download managers were a thing. Still,
costly things feel more valuable, so I'd take a good hard look at what I
really wanted before I committed to an 18 hour download for an installer ISO,
and I'd certainly use it. Ubiquitous availability diminishes perceived value,
for me at least. The large shift was from dialup/ISDN to DSL, I think, because
it gave me more than ten times the speed (instead of the small increased with
9.6 => 14.4 => 28.8 => 56k => 64k).

Sadly, just turning down the bandwidth doesn't turn back time - I've
experienced that first hand when somebody killed the box connecting the
building to the ISP and I had to fall back on mobile... it was like playing
Tetris on level 99 and then being thrown back to level 01.

------
cottonseed
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.

~~~
GraemeL
I use a user script called Google Hit Hider by Domain that adds this
functionality to pretty much every major search engine. Can't imagine
searching without it these days.

~~~
cottonseed
This is perfect. Perma-ban, so sweet. Thanks GraemeL!

Too bad search engines aren't using this to improve search results.

------
joshwcomeau
Great intro, but where’s the actual article?

(Also it’s pretty harsh to say that it takes “little talent” to become an SEO
expert. Like all industries, there are charlatans selling snake oil, but there
are experts who have invested a lot of time in developing their skill sets,
and it’s not nice to be so dismissive.)

~~~
shripadk
"but where’s the actual article?"

There isn't. It is another article that will end up in the SEO landfill the
author is complaining about along with other "spammy" articles that already
exist in the landfill.

In essence, this is another "spammy" article to promote his product cleverly
disguised as an anti-spam/anti-SEO article.

I suspect an SEO agency actually told him to write this article to generate
conversation (people who resonate with the intro will share it on all social
circles and cause it to go "organically" viral). As they say, all publicity is
good publicity.

This is as meta as it gets!

------
dmix
We tried paying a big SEO consultant with a long track record of big-name
successes (allegedly) $10k/month and the poor results we’re getting had as
much to do with the whole hiring high paid consultants who waste your time in
weekly meeting busywork than actual SEO not working. Not a good idea for small
businesses or startups, even if you can afford it, IMO.

SEO is still a long term investment that every company needs to make for the
benefit of their users, helping people find you and your information on search
engines is a good thing (assuming you’re providing real value).

The only problem are the spam sites who still succeed occasionally on the
fringes. Which was why we were motivated to get SEO (and SEM) help in the
first place - as one of our biggest competitors is a shameless gray/black hat
spammer that their poor customers keep finding on Google.

------
ehnto
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 all the fluff articles trying to sell me shit. The
internet, as free as it is, has been overflowed with commercial activity.
Which pretty closely reflects the real world, but damn that's a shame.

~~~
userbinator
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.

~~~
phkahler
Grep the internet and sort by pagerank was great. Then everyone removed links
that went offsite. Then link farms. The fake blogs and influencers are the
evolution of link farms. Unfortunately sellers will game the system. How do we
create a way for buyers to game it?

~~~
tarsinge
Maybe it’s time to bring back curated web directories like the original Yahoo?

~~~
marvin-83
Yeah, I think so.

Curation-as-a-service could even become a viable market. It's arguably already
happening to a certain extent through various platforms, creators, and
aggregators; but it's not really split off as its own service yet.

------
dreamcompiler
The Internet needs a good non-profit search engine that has no conflicts of
interest. It could be funded by a foundation like Wikipedia or by the
government like PBS, but the world sorely needs this resource.

~~~
hedora
Most people forget (or never realized) that the main benefit page rank had
over previous search engines was that it briefly bypassed pay for placement.

At this point, if search results are dominated by SEO paid placement, then
Google search should be as ripe for disruption as the search engines it
replaced.

I think a non-profit, curated index is a good first step to disintermediating
this whole shady (and spammy) industry.

~~~
dreamcompiler
Yep. That was Google in the early days before they got into the advertising
business and before their IPO.

------
BLKNSLVR
Is this merely a continuation of the inevitable "Eternal September" effect?

The internet is a reflection of its users. That's why HN'ers tend to look back
on 'what it once was' very romantically, because back then it only catered to
the technically-minded, the critical thinkers, and so the content matched the
demographic.

In hindsight (because I'm not smart enough to have seen it before it happened,
and only just smart enough to join the already-joined dots) this was
inevitable. Catering to world + dog means anything goes in the pursuit of
eyeballs (= sales). Whatever search system is put in place will be manipulated
towards this goal.

If a large proportion of the users don't care / don't notice / accept this is
normal, then it IS normal.

Television, Radio, newspapers, and magazines are all (predominantly)
advertising landfills.

------
gk1
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.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _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._

------
skywhopper
This is just the flip side of what was at the time a revolutionary search
strategy: prior to Google search results were even worse than they are now.
Altavista and the rest were just indexing content and providing naive text
search over their cache of the Internet and spammers had ensured that only
very specific searches having nothing to do with commerce were discoverable.

Then Google came along with PageRank, which rated pages based on which and how
many other sites linked to them. Suddenly the Internet was usable again. For a
few years. But spammers caught on and the algorithm has had to become more
complex. But companies are so desperate for attention and there’s so much
money floating around that the huge swaths of entirely fake content have
sprung up and become more and more sophisticated.

Unfortunately Google still rules and it takes some unsavory activity to get a
new product or service to surface effectively. That’s not actually a new
phenomenon, it’s just different mechanisms. But I feel sorry for anyone in the
situation described here. I would not be able to bring myself to do effective
PR in this or any other age.

------
dheera
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.

~~~
spectre256
Its a really nice idea, but I wonder if it would work in practice:

1\. Would a significant amount of real humans who actually cared about the
content cast a vote (up or down)?

2\. Would it be even remotely possible to protect against fraudulent voting at
Google scale? (remember they can't even prevent fake business listings on
Google Maps, which is at least theoretically closer to verifiable from, for
example, business records)

~~~
theturtletalks
I don't think it will work in practice. Reddit and other voting platforms
require a login to prevent spam voting and do people want Google to know which
articles you like and don't? Reddit works because anonymity which Google will
not provide.

~~~
microwavecamera
But Reddit, along with most major sites now, is also rife with the same
marketing manipulators and "influencers" the article is commenting on. Digg
tried something similar before Reddit and was pretty much ruined by biased
organized vote manipulation (brigading). Not that I agree with Google's "trust
us plebes we know better than you" model of secrecy either. The SEO problem is
the prime example of why this doesn't work also. Search engines have become a
vital resource for the modern internet. We need an open, publicly funded non-
profit search engine.

------
beefield
I guess if google was willing to do no evil for a moment and actually think
what would make both their search better for the user and www better place
overall, they would put a big button next to each search result saying roughly
"Hey, dear google. Every thing I have ever seen in this domain is full of
crap. Please do not ever again show any page from this domain in my search
results" And then use the information from this button to lower the search
score for any domain with high level of users willing to ignore a domain
completely.

~~~
progval
While I would personally love such a feature; there's the issue of computer
illeterate people who accidentally click on it for a domain they care about,
forget about it, and then have no idea why the google is broken

~~~
hombre_fatal
Same reason why turning off wifi/bluetooth on iOS only turns it off for 24
hours. I reckon it avoids an incredible amount of confusion.

------
baxtr
Maybe the mentioned “consultants” told him to write an SEO rant and post it on
HN? Hmm...

~~~
draugadrotten
Yes, of course.

 _" Simultaneously they have a team ... basically seeding a link of my site on
as many other sites as they can get hold of. "_

------
gist
Let me give another perspective on this from "the school of 'old school'"

Back in the day of yellow page advertising one of the barriers to getting
business was placing an expensive advertisement in the yellow pages (for
certain types of businesses). I can personally attest to the advantage of
doing that. That is I was able to build a business from nothing ZERO sales to
over $2m/year using a yellow page ad as the only advertising expense (also
used direct mail though). Many of my competitors never wanted to spend the
money for a similar ad. (You had to pay for an entire year). It just seemed to
expensive to them. It was. That was good though, not bad 'psychological
barrier to entry'. Back in the day it was several thousand dollars per month
without knowing (the first time) what kind of results you would get.

My point is having to pay that money (and the effort of designing an ad and
paying for it) showed commitment to what you were doing (at that time). It's
just another way to differentiate from the competition. We were entirely self
funded also and took business away from large corporations that did the exact
same thing as we did. In the end having to pay for that ad was a good thing,
not a bad thing.

I don't know all of google's logic with why they decide who gets SEO juice or
not but I wouldn't discount what I am talking about as one of the reasons that
things work this way.

------
hartator
It’s hard to take this seriously when the author is trying to sell a tool to
help send email spam.

~~~
yborg
The mere existence of a blogpost by a guy complaining that it's a hassle to
shill his thing that generates spam on the Internet on the Internet makes the
point better than anything written in it - it's almost the pure essence of SEO
garbage itself. Whether the irony is unintended or it's deliberate marketing,
it's a perfect embodiment.

------
jonex
It started off strong, nicely illustrating the background leading to this
mess, but then the conclusion falters, in particular the accusation of: "Don’t
the makers of Search Engines know this? Of course they do. It’s just not in
their interest to bring clarity." without any suggestions on what they could
be doing to achieve that clarity.

To me, it sadly seems like a losing war between the SEO-spammers and the
search engine developers. There's no law of nature making it possible to
separate fake content from true content. If The spam is good enough, I'm not
even sure a human can do it.

Maybe the concept of trust-less content distribution will have to come to an
end at some point and we will start ranking searches based on more or less
manually maintained trust graphs?

~~~
saagarjha
> If The spam is good enough

“Good spam” is just real content.

~~~
jonex
Yes, more or less. But with the difference that it doesn't even attempt at
being true.

We've been spoiled by the internet of old, where geeky types wrote blogs and
created web sites sharing their intricate knowledge of their favourite topic.
Of course there's a fair share of conspiracy theorists and incorrect ideas,
but it was generally in good faith and somewhat easy to filter.

Now you won't find those anymore, instead we get SEO-optimising sites with
text sourced via Fiverr resembling meaningful content but without any
ambitions whatsoever of correctness nor meaningfulness. Best case, it just
ends up in frustration as you realise that it's just filler, worse case, it
actually misleads you with some made-up fact that you couldn't see any reason
to lie about.

------
corodra
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 pay for an ad for it,
why bother with the publisher or even "seo quality" writing? Just write
quality while ignoring seo tactics, put it on your own domain and pay for the
ad yourself.

Again, I'm no expert and I have no skin in this game. Anyones two cents?
Especially if you own an ecommerce site of some sort.

~~~
nickserv
I'm not an expert but have worked with some, developing seo tools.

What I've seen is that Google or FB ads are used by big clients that can
afford it as a quick and easy way to get visits.

An seo 'expert' whose main recommendation is to get Google ads is no expert at
all.

They can be _part_ of a marketing campaign but are by no means the most cost
effective way to getting good rankings, and users are more likely to click on
organic search results than ads.

------
oconnor663
> 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.

~~~
zo1
I reckon that arms-race only exists because the web is fundamentally broken
due to having/allowing some level of anonymity.

If you could perma-ban a spammer's real world identity or that of his company
(or any company they're a part of), then there would be no need for the arms
race. Just a continual "negotiation" whereby bad behavior is informed and
requested to stop. And if that entity decided to ignore such a request they'd
get the nuclear option of being permanently banned from the platform. You
could argue that such a system would not be that different to real-world
licensing requirements/restrictions as applied to lawyers and doctors.

Just follow the identity like you would the money, and you could solve a good
chunk of this issue.

------
Havoc
It does seem to have worsened lately. Especially the crappy Consent to cookies
things that block half the screen with an advert covering the other half. Even
with a adblocker and pi hole it's becoming unbearable

~~~
Yhippa
You can thank the GDPR for the annoying cookie popup.

~~~
flukus
99% of these cookie warnings are not GDPR compliant, they offer no option to
opt-out and continue reading the site (cookies are not required for a blog
post to function and even if they were these don't need the warning) and they
opt-in by default, all the tracking cookies are still there no matter whether
you accept or not.

Anyone that thinks this is GDPR compliance shouldn't be allowed to touch a
computer.

------
m0rdecai
There are bad actors in every industry. Good job generalizing here. I’m one of
those “bottom feeders” you wrote about to promote your service.

I’m sorry you got conned by a snake oil salesman. It sounds like your BS
detector is broken. It’s a shame you didn’t do a bit more research to find a
credible SEO service (or learn to do it the right way yourself).

"Good SEO” isn’t about “tricking search engines”. It’s about empathy for the
user, and has a strong UX component.

If you're creating hollow content, or a poor experience otherwise, why would
you expect users to convert, let alone come back to the site or tell a friend
about it?

My SEO philosophy/approach is to gain a solid understanding of the intent
behind a query/problem, and then create the best experience possible to
address/answer that query. When you do a better job at answering the user
question than the other sites out there, and your "UX metrics", (i.e. bounce
rate, time on site) validate this experience, you're on the right path.

It's obviously more complicated than this, but that's where I start.

“Good SEO” is a long-term bet. “Tricks” that get you ranking on the first page
are useless if search visitors bounce from your site once they realize your
content is rubbish. Will AI-generated content create a best-in-class
experience for a user? I have a hard time believing that it would.

Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying your free traffic.

------
nemild
The irony is that this page will help improve the SEO of this domain.

~~~
spzb
It's not irony if that was the desired effect

------
orkon
I kind of agree, and I think nowadays it's hard to promote a product on the
Internet or even get noticed without putting a lot of effort. When the
Internet was smaller, I guess it's been easier.

Off-topic: the author's product seems similar to my open source tool
[https://github.com/justcomments/newsletter-
cli](https://github.com/justcomments/newsletter-cli) which allows sending
emails via AWS SES

~~~
agumonkey
I wonder if the web will saturate and clog, start to cost more to keep up and
maintain and lose users that feels walking around and talking is simpler.

~~~
onefuncman
this is already true

~~~
agumonkey
how much ? is it nascent or do you see slightly large changes ?

------
daveheq
I don't know why this ranked here. This is an overly-simolistic cynical take
on SEO and search engines. Get into detail, state examples supporting your
assertions. Sure search engines make money on junk SEO, but it's not their
primary motivator and at least Google works to diminish junk SEO. Their
product just does better and makes more money on quality content; Google knows
this and it's why they're still the top player in the game.

------
halr9000
> And that’s what the internet has become. Full of gossip, junk content, paid
> posts, con articles, click bait links, sock-puppetry, spam, regurgitated
> spam, free e-books, self aggrandizement, fake followers, fake news, - all
> designed to achieve one thing - con the Search Engine - and you.

Most of this is junk, but TBH the free e-books don't bother me one bit. I even
like a few of the peddlers who deploy this tactc, if the content is any good.

------
titzer
An advertising agency should _absolutely not_ be trusted to "Organize the
world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

------
sova
It's a strong observation, now what do you propose we do about it?

~~~
sametmax
Just because you observe a problem doesn't mean you have a solution. That
doesn't remove the value from the observation, as long as it's not a way to
just regularly complain at everything without a goal.

------
vxNsr
I honestly think the only way back from this is to curated lists like in the
old days.

Or specialized search engines. as a user I'm often using byzantine strings of
words to get the result I want because of all the SEO if I had access to an
engine that only had programming related stuff, or only had recipe related
websites, or only political stuff I think I would have an easier time
searching it would also give the creators of the specific content an easy
place to post their wares.

Kinda like specialized torrent sites. Ever since I got access to content
specific torrent sites I haven't used public sites, and I have only had to use
private general sites once or twice.

Because the search-engine is content specific it'll be better at organizing
the information and surfacing what I'm interested in finding, I think there
will still be a place for google but it'll be less useful than it is today.

------
walshemj
This is a service for spammers complaining about SEO LOL

------
spinach
It's in part because of the search engine's business model, just like other
free apps like Facebook that suffer similar problems where the person who is
consuming the product is not actually the customer.

A free product from companies that aspire to be multi-million, multi-billion
dollar global companies and are celebrated by those in the tech industry for
doing so, even with a 'free' product. The idea of a liberal and free internet
and free products with an idolization and celebration of wealth of those same
companies doesn't work. We end up with the landfill. We got what we paid for,
didn't we (nothing).

------
macspoofing
Could it be anything otherwise? For any given search term there may be
millions of results but only 50 or so will make the first page. No matter what
you do, you can't expect to be one of those 50.

We've reached an era when you can't simply rely on the search engine to do
your marketing for you. You'll have to do the traditional route of marketing
where you take the responsibility of getting the word out on your product.

This is similar to YouTubers complaining when their traffic takes a nose-dive
because YouTube tweaked some recommendation algorithm.

In other words, this is what the long-tail looks like.

------
schachin
BTW I see a lot of -- Google does not give me back what I ask for when I type
is X -- and that is true.

That is NOT because of SEO however. That is their use of AI in language
interpretation and how it is being used in algorithms, which really, well
sucks.

If you want them to get better go to Twitter and tell them how irrelevant they
have become or how much you hate the ads or all the featured spaces - because
you know what SEOS have been telling them for a long time, but they ignore us.

If regular users started telling them? They might listen. _________ But this
post? It is bovine feces.

------
bartimus
> Why? Because there’s so much competition in my line of business and i need
> the initial paid traffic.

So this in itself is a problem. Why would your business be more relevant if
there's much meaningful competition?

It really depends on what you're searching for. Taking the bike example. No
search engine could ever give a meaningful result when just searching for
"bike". You need to get more deep into the material and search with
specialized terms. "bike internal hub" looks pretty fair in Google.

~~~
dmerrick
I checked out his product and I can see his predicament... a lot of other
services do the same things. He's just doing it in a simple way (with what
appears to be a very sane pricing model).

------
volandovengo
Would suggest that SEO is just one of many tactics to acquire users. I bet
that from this article - you'll get waaaay more customers for your early stage
product than ranking on google would have gotten you at this early stage.

I used to be obsessed with SEO - now I realize that many companies, search
just isn't the best way to acquire customers. I saw this - currently investing
in SEO and moving up the rankings steadily because long term - it feels like a
great source of brand awareness.

------
alexashka
There are more general terms for the author describes, it's 'advertising' and
'marketing'.

This is the cost of having a free market - people are free to compete on it.

This is the cost of freedom of speech - idiots get to talk.

You can fix this to an extent with laws - for example you can't advertise
cigarettes to children. Just be aware that you can't have it all and live your
life :)

------
zeofig
I still don't know what SEO stands for (presumably search engine something)
after reading this article. Nice.

------
sixtypoundhound
I think this verges on the definition of irony: the guy who wants to stuff my
email inbox putting SEO on blast....

------
alt_f4
I agree that paying for SEO is probably pointless; unless you're just paying
for some Google ads yourself.

But the problem with your product isn't SEO, it's that anyone who knows what
SES is, also knows how to use it for the thing you're selling, without paying
an additional fee.

~~~
ajonit
That is an incorrect observation. There are people making a living out of
selling exact similar scripts as the OP. (Sendy comes at the top of my mind)

------
nullwasamistake
I blame Google. They could easily derank sites with paywalls, interstitials,
and 4mb of trackers but this goes against their core business. When paywalls
stopped being considered "cloaking" I knew the free web was done for Google
search.

I'm not sure if there's much research on the subject, but in my experience a
huge majority of "slow" sites are directly caused by tons of tracking and ad
code.

~~~
hombre_fatal
But paywalls, interstitials, and trackers don't mean the website isn't what
the user is searching for.

~~~
nullwasamistake
How many of us are actually okay with any of that? I've never paid for an
"article" subscription and don't know anyone that has.

Google should provide at least the dumbest notation of "this site is
paywalled". What you click is no longer what site you end up on.

I would much rather just see the 99% of internet pages that are free, remove
that other shit from my search results. But it's Google's bread and butter so
they never will

Oh, poor content farms can't make money that way? Good. I'm fine with my
internet feed looking like 1999. The internet was far more useful before it
was a medium for a bunch of assholes to make money off "content"

------
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.

------
syphilis2
I'd love a search engine comprised of everyone's bookmarks.

~~~
simonswords82
At least one firm already tried that:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_\(website\))

------
jormungand
Unfortunately SEO ruins great, witty and brief marketing texts.

~~~
hiccuphippo
But why is that? Do search engines rank better when a text is longer? Or is it
that with more words there's a higher possibility that one will match with
what the user is searching? And doesn't it all just make users waste more time
searching for something concrete?

Maybe there's space for search engines that can summarize a page if it's long
and give the user what they want.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
It's not really longer/shorter, the core issue is that people don't search for
witty titles, they are usually trying to get something done.

In SEO terms the "get something done" is described as "user intent".

Imagine you have written an article describing how to change the oil in a Ford
Mustang.

What title better fits user intent:

"How to change the oil on a Ford Mustang"

or

"An afternoon of tomfoolery, broken wrenches and dirty hands with an American
classic"

If you are at all interested in people finding you on Google you need to have
a title that's more like the former than the latter.

~~~
bscphil
On the one hand, that sounds like a good thing, rather than a bad thing. On
the other hand, that doesn't match up with my experience at all. There's far
too much nonsense out there that sounds like the latter and exists to waste
your time.

------
fiatjaf
Searching for "transactional ses" or "aws ses transactional" on DuckDuckGo
gives me sendwithses.com easily.

The same searches on Google never find anything.

------
colechristensen
Open question:

How could you create a sustainable search engine business optimizing for
quality results? i.e. not tailoring results for maximizing revenue

------
ex3xu
I think what frustrates me most about the current state of SEO is that it is a
race to the bottom for both businesses and consumers. Below a certain
threshhold of notability, traffic essentially becomes correlated with SEO
spend. Even the business that wins the SEO war in its local community can end
up with issues, as for certain industries the disproportionate number of eyes
on the first few links can easily balloon into an unmanageable amount of
service calls and customer support infrastructure needs, when all the while
perfectly adequate businesses languish away on the second and third SERPs ends
up fighting over the remaining 5% traffic scraps.

In an ideal world, traffic numbers would be correlated with some combination
of product quality mixed with a sort of load-balancing effect so that each
quality company could match their available supply to the demand. I still
believe, perhaps naively, that search engines could have profitably built
infrastructure to serve the needs of consumers in this way -- focus group-like
services for commercial search that would require companies to pay for the
privilege of submitting to objective evaluations of their products in exchange
for more traffic. In a structure like this, the incentives of search engines
and end users could be aligned.

Instead, Eric Schmidt and the rest of the market share MBAs came into the
picture and we got precisely the opposite -- instead of holding businesses
beholden to the needs of end users, now we have this insidious and dystopian
perpetual advertising machine where not only are businesses now beholden to
the needs of a faceless SEO algorithm, funneling money away from R&D and into
this annoying waterfall of trite crap noted by this article, but IMO even
worse is that end users are essentially beholden to the needs of the
corporations -- either by getting creepily data-mined and harvested for the
benefit of the highest AdWords bidder, or by getting inundated by constant
ads, as anyone who has tried watching YouTube without AdBlocker on can attest
to. I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that nobody wins except the
search engine stockholders.

I was totally heartbroken when Google sold out and created AdWords. I naively
had thought it would never happen -- Brin and Page were literally on record
saying, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards
the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” (Anatomy of a Large-
Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998)[0].

So I've had embarrassingly heated discussions with Googler family members
where I raise this issue, and their defense has been essentially that AdWords
is a necessary evil that funds all their infrastructure expenses, as well as
their cool R&D and "20% time" and all their ML advancements that they get to
do, like AlphaGo, Waymo etc.

But I really think that when your company depends on perverse incentives in
this way, the end result will ultimately drift away from their original job of
serving consumers, and eventually exist only to inflate their own share price
and run what amounts to a protectionist racket. The only difference is that
the threat of withholding SEO traffic is much cheaper and efficient option
than mafia shakedowns.

------
zackmorris
Off the top of my head on a Sunday, a few laws that might help remedy the SEO
situation:

* Make all posted internet content public domain (no limits on scraping).

* Make any scraped public data used for profit be available to the public via a license similar to the GPL (similarly to how medical research of public data should be shared with the public rather than hidden behind a paywall).

* Legally separate search from industries such as advertising and shipping (apply some antitrust legislation for once).

* Require some sort of tech support for redress of grievances (if a human can't be reached within say 10 business days, allow escalation to a government agency that can apply injunctions or other red tape to encourage monopolistic companies to play nicely).

* Implement steep fines for market manipulation, similar to insider trading laws. If a search engine pulls the listing that another business's livelihood depends upon, and it can be proven that (for example) a competitor or business partner initiated the pull, then it should open the search engine up to collusion charges. Frivolous pulls not remedied after say 10 business days would be treated as malicious and open the search engine to an audit of its relationships with its clients in that space.

Please if anyone has more ideas, let's hear them. I'd vote to look at the
merits of any new laws rather than their likelihood of being implemented,
which I realize is likely quite low!

------
booleandilemma
SEO is essentially voodoo bullshit right? The people I’ve met who hawk it are
the same people who in the same breath refer to themselves as UX
professionals, interaction designers, or some other nebulous term. It’s yet
another thing that requires little to no training but gives these people clout
in their organization and a role to play.

------
hollerith
The internet is fine (as far as I can tell). The _web_ is an SEO landfill.

~~~
buboard
More precisely ‘the web shown in the front page of google results’

~~~
onemoresoop
Is Bing or DuckDuckGo not affected by this problem also? Just asking..

~~~
buboard
not much different, however it is google's first page that sets the standards
for SEO tricks.

------
p0larboy
A plumber open shop in a highly competitive neighborhood with thousands of
other plumbers right at the customers' fingertip.

He is highly-skilled, or at least he believes himself to be.

But he doesn't believe in marketing. "Marketers are bottom-feeders."

Said plumber did not do well. Blame everyone except his ego.

------
blue_devil
I suppose people upvoted this for the refreshing quality of a candid rant.

------
gfodor
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.

~~~
nickserv
I'm inclined to thinking the article is actually a great marketing technique
for this product.

I mean, it's peddling a way of sending marketing emails via AWS... Nothing
spammy there!

------
swayvil
I have the solution!

If the domain contains a shopping cart then filter it out.

What do you think?

~~~
Theodores
Kind of the opposite. Amazon and other big retailers dominate, sometimes you
want to know what other people are selling and to buy from them. Right now
there isn't a lot of point in ecommerce as the land grab has already gone.

My idea of a better filter is to rate pages on the quality of the HTML. SEO is
never about that and the search engines essentially ignore all the element
tags.

If there was an incentive for people to write non-bloated HTML that used all
the elements and had proper document outlines rather than just look pretty
then I think we could eliminate people who can't do decent web pages,
including Amazon.

------
tardo99
This is all made worse by the fact that search is a monopoly.

~~~
bdcravens
Further cemented by the fact that the company also has a lion's share of
browser (about 70%) and mobile eyeballs (about 75%)

~~~
buboard
further cemented by the fact that the same company also pays those sites for
having good SEO with adsense revenue.

------
swayvil
What would be a good name for a commerce-free search engine?

~~~
smt88
Wikipedia is basically an information search engine without commerce or social
media.

The problem is that your results page is the article itself, and you need to
scroll to the bottom to get to an external site.

It's theoretically possible to change the UI or analyze Wikipedia to make a
pretty solid search engine powered by millions of person-years of curation.

~~~
swayvil
That is an extremely valuable insight. Thank you very much!

------
systematical
Its been this way for 15+ years.

------
schachin
This post is just flat out wrong.

We are not using tricks when we tell you to create content. We are telling you
what Google considers quality.

Tricks are for blackhats and they can work and there is nothing wrong with
that, but what you are talking bout is actual white hat SEO that Google
demands from sites to be considered quality enough to rank.

And the "it's easy" garbage.

Go ahead. Let us know how easy it is when you are done doing it by yourself.

This post is full of bovine feces.

~~~
dang
It sounds like you know a lot on this topic and have good information to
contribute, but could you please read
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and stick to the rules when posting here? For example, the rule that asks you
to edit out the name-calling ("garbage", "bovine feces") is an important one.

------
4ntonius8lock
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 else is stupid for not
being an engineer, but forget that more than just engineers are needed. I'm
guessing that is how you end up with Google +.

~~~
bscphil
>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.)

~~~
4ntonius8lock
Well every site that ranks does SEO.

So the issue shouldn't be in the methods, but in the end game. Like, what
value are you bringing. He could bring value and get a ton of money.

For example mortgage calculators. There are a million. Pick one, and rank it.
You'll be making millions while providing value.

Strange he isn't doing it, since it is so easy and all. I mean, whatever his
goals in life, a few million a year will probably help push that.

