
How SEO Ruined the Internet - midef
https://www.superhighway98.com/seo
======
RobertoG
It kind of ruined content too.

Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the
answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content.

Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to
explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will
know why SEO ruined content.

In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of content created,
unfortunately, as we are going to explain in a moment, it has been ruined by
SEO.

¿Is it SEO really the reason content was ruined?

Some people argue that SEO is not really the reason content was ruined, we
will review all the reason why SEO could be really ruining content.

Please, click "next" to know why SEO could be ruining content.

~~~
RobertoG
I just searched (1) "SEO ruined content" in duck duck go and this Hacker news
page is the first entry.

We are very lucky that, as far as we know, an accumulation of irony doesn't
create black holes.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SEO+ruined+content&t=canonical&ia=...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SEO+ruined+content&t=canonical&ia=web)

~~~
hombre_fatal
Currently page 2 on Google.

To be fair, "SEO ruined content" is a pretty specific search string and
doesn't even show up in the results that out-rank this submission. This
comment specifically talks about "SEO ruined content" and is, correctly, a
good results candidate.

~~~
bolasanibk
>Currently page 2 on Google.

And now on first page

~~~
abakker
5th result.

~~~
oldtapwater
It's the first one for me now.

~~~
arushisomani
Likewise.

------
Animats
The moment when Google turned to the dark side was in 2005-2006, when they
stopped sponsoring the "Web Spam Squashing Summit" and started sponsoring SEO
conventions.

 _" There's going to be a Web Spam Squashing Summit next week: Thursday, Feb
24th. (2005). Technorati is organizing the event (thanks guys!) and we're
hosting it on-site at Yahoo in Sunnyvale. The main goal to get the tool makers
in a room together to talk about web spam, share info, and brainstorm. So far
AOL, Google, MSG, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo are on board. I hope we'll
also have representation from Feedster, WordPress (hi Matt), and Ask Jeeves
and/or Bloglines too."_[1]

The next year, in 2006, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, addressed the Search Engine
Strategies conference.[2]

 _" The search advertising market – a tremendous credit to you and to the
organization that built this conference..."_

And that's when Google turned evil. From trying to stop search spam, to
promoting it.

[1]
[http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004256.html](http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004256.html)

[2]
[https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html](https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html)

~~~
josephjrobison
I can tell you as an in-the-trenches SEO that Google is 100% not in cahoots
with SEOs in any way.

Google WILL bend over backwards for paid search agencies that direct their
clients ad spend through AdWords - but this is not SEO. These paid search
agencies that funnel millions to AdWords will get invited to Mountain View,
get paid lunches, visits from Googlers, etc. - but this is SEM not SEO.

What does Google do for SEOs? They have a handful of ambassadors that answer
questions on a weekly basis. While they are generous with their time
([https://twitter.com/JohnMu](https://twitter.com/JohnMu)), they keep things
very close to the chest regarding the details of their algorithms. They will
send some speakers to some SEO conferences, but will rarely if ever sponsor an
SEO conference unless it's a part of a broader paid advertising or marketing
tech conference.

Google's Algorithm updates -
[https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-
algorithm...](https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-algorithm-
updates) \- rolling out every month or so are notoriously a black box and
frustrate SEOs to no end!

~~~
droopyEyelids
You base your judgement on the legal and public communication between Google
and SEOs.

Everyone else is basing their judgement on the effect google has on the Web.

------
mcv
I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It
gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything
obscure is impossible to find.

I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-
find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for,
or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition
of a common but complex term, am I looking for a specific article that I
vaguely remember a phrase from, do I want something I've seen before, or am I
in the mood to discover new, unexpected things?

Also, I just don't want to see results from some sites. Let me tweak the
importance of some sites, rather than relying on Google's gameable algorithms.

~~~
eitland
To me it seems the problem with Google goes far deeper than struggling with
bad SEO.

\- For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful
to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at
all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and
some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to
enclose our queries in double quotes and set the "verbatim" option.

\- Ad targeting has been so bad it has been ridiculous. Yes, on average it
works but around the edges it is somewhere between tragic and hilarious. For
ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was
dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays, not tech conferences, not
magazine subscriptions, not offers from local shops, but scammy dating sites
that was so ridiculous that I cannot imagine how most people would fall for
them. (For a while I wondered if this was all a fluke but now I have confirmed
it happens to others in my situation as well.)

\- Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example: what is the
idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while I'm logged in with two
different google controlled accounts, one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?

~~~
mcv
> _" For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful
> to the search you actually typed in."_

Good lord, yes. If I type two words, I want preference for sites that contain
both of them, yet the first results all have either one or the other, because
surely I must be more interested in a popular site that uses only one of
these, right? Google is sometimes too smart, trying to interpret exact words I
type as vaguely related words. Sometimes that's relevant, but often it's not.

> _" For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could
> think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays,"_

They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need
anymore because you already found it. I don't think AI is in any danger of
taking over the world just yet. Except with bad advertising, apparently.

~~~
wizzwizz4
> _I don 't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet._

The scary thing about AI is that, even as the algorithms have greater and
greater intelligence, we're still not much closer to teaching them to do what
we want them to do. They can game the system better than ever, and then the
universe is tiled with surgical masks.

~~~
mcv
So if AI ever takes over the world and kills us all, it will probably be
because it failed to understand what we actually wanted.

~~~
WalterSear
[https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)

[https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html](https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html)

------
ThePhysicist
If I had one word to characterize the modern web it would be "shallow". SEO
and commercialization have led to a world wide web where I can easily find 100
shallow, keyword-optimized articles on "machine learning for IoT" published on
high-ranking websites, but not a single page with actual in-depth information
about the topic.

But there still is great content on the web, it just becomes harder to find in
all the noise. I think websites like HN and Reddit and - to some degree -
sites like Twitter with their human-based curation are really important for
this, so I'm glad they're thriving.

------
jedberg
Early SEO efforts were actually good for the web. They forced you to make your
content easier to find and more accessible.

But then that became the table stakes, and people had to start resorting to
dirtier tactics. Or just more annoying ones.

During this shelter in place period, I've been reading a lot more recipes
online. Every one of them starts with the person's life story. And I get it,
maybe how that recipe came to exist is interesting. But at least put a link
right at the top that says "skip to recipe" or something. Sometimes I want to
read the story, sometimes not. Make it easy for me skip!

I put a recipe on my own website, it's literally a .txt file with just the
recipe, ingredients right at the top. I posted a picture of the final product
on the internet recently, and a friend asked for the recipe, so I sent him the
link.

He replied "the format and delivery method of this is almost more satisfying
than the recipe itself".

That's how I know we've gone too far in SEO.

~~~
ip26
It's good ol' Goodhart's Law, all over again.

------
silexia
The article linked here has a good point it is trying to make, but makes a
number of false points that undercut it's goal.

1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking
for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results
buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams.

Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or
help your SEO.

The real problems are that Google is directing the bulk of traffic to certain
brand name websites. Another real problem is that Google set a simplistic AI
with a goal of increasing clickthrough from search results and decreasing
bounce rates. This leads to developers building all those top 10 lists where
you have to click through each item (harder to bounce that way), and some of
the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.

I also agree Google should be showing smaller websites more frequently -
perhaps optimize for a different goal than the one listed above. More weight
on keyword matching perhaps or maybe following only a few "authoritative"
users CTR & bounce rate habits.

~~~
Cyberdog
> Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or
> help your SEO.

Typical SEO cargo cult behavior. This worked at one time, or at least it
_seemed_ to work, so we'll just keep doin' it.

I can't really blame SEO people, though. As long as Google keeps its
algorithms secret, I'm not sure what else they're supposed to do except
publish good content and hope for the best - which, in an ideal world, would
be good enough, but…

------
sub7
Wasn't SEO, it was a Google's "Suggest over Search" strategy, followed by the
completely predictable bastardization of organic results by internal groups.

Biz ops says increasing revenue for [random Google bs] by ranking Y over Z in
the results, so it happens. M&A says Rotten Tomatoes won't give us all their
data, their users and their firstborns so they won't show up, even on page 2.

This is literally what antitrust was created for. Companies do this naturally
when they get too successful, it's on us to remind them who pays the bills.

By us I mean the US govt so we're basically fucked.

~~~
DeathArrow
>By us I mean the US govt so we're basically fucked.

I'd imagine Mr Trump tweeting: "Google is broken. I am the only one that can
fix it."

------
thawaway1837
I’d argue that having the internet limited to a handful of gatekeepers, all of
whom are sustained by ad dollars, is probably far more responsible for ruining
the internet.

I find it hard to believe that in a world where Google and Facebook’s users
were its customers and not its product, it wouldn’t be able to find a way to
combat SEO effectively, especially considering how they are basically hoarding
the majority of the smartest people in the world.

------
monk_e_boy
I worked in SEO for ages, and it's shady as f. You can buy links from anyone,
the BBC the guardian, the times... It just costs money. You can ask/force
people to take links down (copyright scare, sue, threaten). Fake blogs, we
used to run a bunch, some became so popular they became actual blogs on that
subject. We'd get money from competitor SEO companies for links on it. There
are tons of niche subjects with no info on the internet. We'd often put it up
for SEO purposes. Wikipedia was started by an SEO company. The rumour was that
Wales started it as a cheap way to get high page rank links to sites he owned.
But the rewards were huge. Get a struggling car insurance site from position
11 in Google to position 2 or 1 and their profits would be 10x. They would
show us numbers from each advertising sector, SEO, radio, TV, newspapers, etc.
Super interesting. Break that down by age / gender ... Very interesting. No
wonder the internet is a shit show. So much money involved and zero
regulation.

------
Jaruzel
A MAJOR problem with google is it's assumption that if you search in English
you don't care if the top results are American.

I've noticed that on google.co.uk, unless you add 'uk' at the end of your
search query you'll always get US sites first [1]. Google clearly lump all
English based queries into the same geo-graphical bucket - they never used to
do this.

\---

[1] Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I am.

~~~
koyote
It's even worse when you are trying to search in a language that is not
English from a region that is English speaking.

I often look for recipes in French or German and it's impossible to find
anything. I try to browse to google.de/fr, I try adding site:.fr but it will
still try and give me the most English results. My Google search settings
indicate I am happy with German and French results but it seems to have no
affect...

~~~
TeMPOraL
I have the reverse problem: Google would happily return me Polish-language
results for everything, where I almost _never_ want that. For the types of
searches I do, there's almost never anything worthwhile in my native language.
This, + their annoying attempt at detecting which country I'm in (so I would
get German results when in Germany, and Chinese results when in China) led me
one day to figuring out the magic URL incantation to force English results,
and replacing the search in omnibar with that.

~~~
NullPrefix
Do share, please.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I don't have the original anywhere; I used it exclusively on my work laptop
two jobs back, which was the only one that moved internationally somewhat
frequently (for the rest of my machines, I clicked around Google settings
until I got English-language results and that usually stuck). But I _think_ it
was
[https://google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s](https://google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s).

------
laichzeit0
Just use a different search engine. Right now DDG is the only viable
alternative. Just force yourself to use it, regardless of all the edge cases
that suck. When DDG becomes as crap as Google, we can use whatever alternative
exists at that time to replace it. The same goes for Instagram, it's slowly
but surely turned into an ad infested cesspit (Three consecutive ads between
user stories? seriously?). This is how the cycle goes I'm afraid.

------
cousin_it
I think most spam websites today could be filtered out with very simple
algorithms. But that would lead to fewer people ending up on these websites
and clicking ads. So if your search engine is also an ad network, filtering
out spam websites is not in your interest.

~~~
Nextgrid
This is the real problem.

SEO will always be a game of cat and mouse. The original algorithms were
designed to surface useful content relevant to the search query with the
limitations of the technology at the time (so they could be gamed).

Nowadays technology has improved and processing power is much cheaper so it
should be possible to use machine learning to recognise what’s “good” and
what’s SEO spam and thus get ahead of the SEO crowd again.

The problem here is that the spam sites are also the ones with ads (often
_Google_ ads), so there is no financial incentive for Google to actually do
anything about those.

------
Gatsky
I think SEO mainly affects content which was already very low quality. Recipe
blogs are a prime example - this is the worst way to get recipes. It is
inferior to books and apps (which are more use in the kitchen), is poorly
indexed, ephemeral (depending on the wordpress knowledge of the owner), lacks
local context, and has none of the rigour and pragmatic advice of something
like seriouseats. They deliberately use weird ingredients I find, perhaps to
prevent you from falsifying the quality of the recipe and also to
differentiate themselves from tried and trusted recipes (which is what most
people want!). The instructions you get on the back of the flour packet are
superior to recipe blogs, at least they should work for that type of flour.

------
pal_9000
The article doesn't present complete facts. Regarding zero-sum game, this
perhaps was true in the old pagerank algorithm. But I'd believe Google's
ranking algorithm has advanced beyond simple keyword density, passing links.
What I've noticed is it now gives much more emphasis to user experience. (With
metrics like bounce rate meaning the searcher didnt find what he looked for
and went back to search results)

We all like to shit on Google but there's no search engine even remotely close
to the quality of results. Of course, there's a lot of spam associated with
SEO, hacking attempts, spam comments, e.t.c. There are side effects of its
algorithm of course, that are negative to web.

~~~
inshadows
How does Google determine bounce rate? That I click on another search result
after I click on the first one?

~~~
Nextgrid
Google search result links don’t link to the site directly but go through a
Google-provided redirect that presumably has a reference to the original
search query.

If you were to go back to the same search result page and click on another
result within a short timeframe they will assume you “bounced”.

They also have Google Analytics littering the majority of the web, so I’m
assuming that gives them a signal as well.

~~~
websitejanitor
It's more complicated than this.

Google links directly to search results now, they stopped using the tracking
redirect years ago. They probably track clicks and scrolling directly on the
SERP with JS.

Google Analytics is absolutely not used for ranking purposes. GA is far too
unreliable and gameable to be used for anything like that. It's more likely
that Chrome and Google Safe Browsing are used for tracking user hits.

------
alexmingoia
I really dislike posts like this on HN. It’s essentially whining. The author
does not suggest any alternative, does not offer any ideas of their own, and
just laments the state of the world.

Instead let’s upvote articles on how to build search engines, how search
indexing could be improved, how Google’s search works, etc.

~~~
kabacha
Why does an article have to do both: raise the problem and provide a fix for
it? Do you also expect journalists to catch serial killers?

~~~
alexmingoia
There's a difference between breaking news and lamenting the state of the
world. Journalists don't write articles that say nothing but "Serial killers
are terrible. I want to live in a world without serial killers."

We can agree to disagree. I personally do not find any value in people
complaining without illuminating the problem they're complaining about, and
seeking or proposing a different vision or solution.

~~~
ric2b
This article is not just whining, it is detailing the ways that SEO has
impacted the internet, many of them not obvious to most people.

------
durnygbur
Google with default settings is useless and using more sophisticated queries
quickly walls off the user with increasingly annoying captcha.

The "world's knowledge under you fingertips" motto is still valid and
brilliant though. My personal solution is library of OCR-ed PDFs with most
established books from various domains, git repository for each domain.
Greppable in miliseconds, locally. Hijack this, SEO experts!

~~~
FiatLuxDave
Your personal solution sounds interesting. I'd be interested to know more
details about it, and how it works for you. If it is how I imagine it, it
could also be one of those things that could be built into a tool that could
rival Wikipedia or search engines.

Based on your reply to handsomechad, you may think that it's easiest for
people to just build one themselves. But there may be a business opportunity
in providing a pre-packaged solution for the masses. In the same way that
Dropbox provided a tool that was "trivial" to experts, but was difficult for
non-experts (see the infamous comment here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)),
if you have a tool that is essentially a rival to Google Books for reference
texts, that is interesting.

~~~
DeathArrow
There's b-ok.org

------
screye
I feel like I know enough about the internet that I almost don't need google
anymore. (the search algorithm is great, but not the sources it provides)

At this point, I have built a set of "sources I trust" and use google as a
tool to internally search their websites more than anything else.

    
    
        site:source.com "search query"
    

Is pretty much how most of my new searches go. If anything, I have stopped
trusting 1st page results on google.

1st page guitar tabs are the most vanilla chord strum patterns. 1st page
recipes are some "americanized - SAHM blog" version of the real thing. 1st
page news is a sensationalized link to CNN or Fox, that doesn't quote 1st
sources. 1st page game reviews are IGN and 1st page movie reviews are Rotten
Tomatoes. For anything more niche google results wikihow or quora, when reddit
almost certainly has a better answer somewhere.

The 1st page of Google search returns perfectly average results. But, I have
stopped expecting any 'perfect' or 'great' results from it.

------
bb123
Is there anything I can do as a user of the web about this? Is there a search
engine out there that is better for these things than Google?

~~~
Cyberdog
To a certain extent, any search engine will be "better" for avoiding some SEO
tricks than Google since somewhere between most to all SEO people are only
concerned with how things rank in Google, thanks to its overwhelming majority
usage on the English internet - where their pages rank in the results of Bing
or Yandex isn't a matter of concern to them. Granted, many of the tricks to
satisfy Google are going to satisfy other engines too, but not all of them,
and not in exactly the same ways or degrees. (Getting a different result page
from Google and from search engine X can be a feature, not a bug.)

I personally have been using DuckDuckGo for several years at this point and am
quite satisfied with their results and their commitment to privacy. You
shouldn't use any Google product if you have any serious measure of concern
for your privacy (he hypocritically types while a YouTube video plays in the
background - hey, at least I'm not logged in).

------
blunte
The situation has gotten so dismal that I often have to look past page 1, and
sometimes page 2 of search results.

Especially when looking for technical things or reviews on practically
anything, the top 5 results are garbage sites (with content written or
modified by people with names suggesting an SEO "content" factory in a
particular region of the world).

~~~
inshadows
Recently, on page 2 and later, and sometimes even on page 1, I see lots of
*.it links that just dump a wall of text that seems like it's been scraped
from legit resources but all tags content got smashed into one text block.
Examples pages that now return 404:

[http://](http://) axlk.bebanni50.it/debian-i915.html

[http://](http://) bpnq.circoloambientalepiemonte.it/nfsv4-uid-mapping.html

IOW, if it's not on page 1 it's mostly crap (spam).

------
tqi
> I remember when it was easy to find logic, facts, and reason on the web.
> Then, someone optimized it.

When was that, exactly? In 1998, when only 3% of the world had access to the
web and creating content was limited to a small handful of privileged
individuals? This author rails against "Directing the narrative", while
building site with a thin sliver of links related to a handful of topics they
deem worthy of inclusion. They offer no solutions for an internet that servers
3.5 billion people, choosing instead to whine about how much better the
internet was "back in the day."

I don't think Google is blameless, but I think they are more of an inevitable
byproduct of this many people coming online than they are a root cause.

------
trey-jones
SEO combined with Amazon (and other) referral revenue opportunities. Combined
with human psychology and ignorance outside of the tech community of the wiles
of online marketing. Honestly Hacker News is one of the few sources I trust
nowadays, and that is of course not implicit. There is a lot of misinformation
and a lot of reporting about reporting. A lot of hyperbolic and misleading
headlines. Stay safe out there.

------
beezle
Google also has reduced its memory by a great extent. Searches run many years
ago which turned up results from the early 90s on return nothing now.

~~~
gukov
This is the result of Google trying to compete with Facebook. The search
results page is their answer to the news feed.

------
grwthckrmstr
For many of my searches, I simply type "search term xyz Reddit" to find more
relevant results than what Google would throw at me.

------
leejoramo
Anybody else remember when you could search for a phone number and find
legitimate web pages that contained the phone number?

We lost that a long time ago.

~~~
calibas
I just tried this out, and it works fine for at least one of the local
organizations here, both in Google and DuckDuckGo (530-926-4698).

I just tried it with my own number, and my site comes up with both search
engines as well.

~~~
runxel
If I am doing that most of the time the first few hundred results are pages
which just list all numbers there are – like in a consecutive manner.

Never understood why there are so many of this pages and why you would build
one...

~~~
TeMPOraL
Ad revenue.

~~~
runxel
Well yeah, maybe in former times, when there was pay-per-view. Don't know
anybody who is still doing this. Nowadays (already 10+ years) ads are only
paid-by-click, because of "conversion".

------
rchaud
Content today is written for machines, not for humans.

There is no bigger turnoff than coming across waves and waves of listicles and
"alternatives to" articles that provide no real insight, beyond dumping a
bunch of links, adding 1,000 words of nothing, titling it "Ultimate Beginner's
Guide to X in 2020" and calling it a day.

Sometimes, to find "actual person" content, I'll add "reddit" to the end of my
search query, but that won't be enough, as some enterprising content marketer
has decided that they need to rank for those searches too, and created posts
like "What reddit thinks about X".

SEO is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that businesses create
this kind of low-quality "linkbait" as "inbound marketing", which is getting
eyeballs on a page (by whatever means necessary) and upselling their own
services. That's why the content feels so soulless.

~~~
jshevek
> that won't be enough, as some enterprising content marketer has decided that
> they need to rank for those searches too

Would it help your goals to use "site:"?

------
Priem19
One might add social media to that list as well. If there's a Dunbar's number
in real life, there definitely is one for online communities too.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number)

------
notJim
This article is good, but to go a bit deeper, it seems like part of the
problem is ultimately capitalism or the commercial nature of the modern
internet. As long as there are these incredible incentives to game the system,
people are going to do so. And those same incentives apply to Google, since
they are advertising driven too. They used to fight more against this stuff,
but I think as they've realized they get their cut either way, they're less
inclined to do so. And even if they were so inclined, it's sort of asking them
hold back the ocean in my view, because the incentives are so stacked against
them.

------
haybanusa
I think Google is to blame for allowing this.

~~~
ForHackernews
Not just "allowing", but directly causing. Google were the ones who first
monetized links by treating them as a search signal.

As soon as links became a signal to search engines, they stopped being an
organic expression of page authors.

What's that old saying about metrics? "You get what you measure."

------
DeathArrow
As I see it, maybe 1% of the web is not junk.

I think we need an alternative search engine based on community vetting.

I.e. you submit your url to the search engine but it isn't present in all
search results until a certain number of real people will say it's meaningful
and useful. You can do that by only showing it first in 1% of search results
and ask people to rate it.

You don't have to index 10 billion websites, you just have to index 1 million
of useful websites.

~~~
brisky
Agree. If you would like you can read an article where I propose how such
system could be implemented: [https://medium.com/@TautviIas/it-is-time-to-
create-a-decentr...](https://medium.com/@TautviIas/it-is-time-to-create-a-
decentralized-public-social-network-128b6c11fd24)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I wonder if Medium would get included in the index.

------
calibas
SEO effectively means catering to whatever metrics Google happens to be
focusing on at the moment. It's supposed to reward "good" content, but there's
really no way of automatically judging what's "good" content so Google relies
on all these other methods that are open to abuse.

Whatever way Google rates websites has a direct effect on the web itself. In a
way they're a victim of their own success.

~~~
laurent123456
Or rather _we_ are the victims of their success.

~~~
calibas
Partially true because of how pervasive they've become, they're powerful
enough to influence the lawmakers in my country. I don't really see myself as
a victim though, I just use different search engines.

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thrwwy9999534
Would be good to have search engine algorithm that searches on visible content
only and places anything with ads and trackers last.

~~~
Nextgrid
That would require the search engine itself to not be funded by those same
ads.

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plerpin
I hate SEO. Google's ranking algorithm is basically an accretion of scar
tissue built from years of SEO bullshit mitigations. If you make a ranking
algorithm that does right by the user, and you're successful, it won't be long
before SEOs come along and poison the well.

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kabacha
> erasing the past

Wouldn't it make sense to archive the old articles and put no-crawl rule on
them? Deleting just seems extreme no matter how you look at it. That being
said - content that is controlled by such people is probably not worth
keeping.

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DeathArrow
So, someone pays a lot of money hiring people to farm content repeating the
same meaningless expressions again and again, to get some visitors from Google
so they can show them some adds and make money.

Wouldn't it be more productive to hire people to write meaningful and
interesting content? That way they wouldn't just have visitors tricked to come
from Google but also a constant following.

The only reason I see for junk content is lack of imagination.

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DeathArrow
Maybe it's time for a search engine developed and ran by the community in the
same way Wikipedia is.

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theklub
Just look up a recipe for something and this fact instantly becomes apparent

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projomni
That's exactly why you're seeing this new generation of startups who are
building high-fidelity content through their own work and crowd-sourcing (like
AskFinny for personal finance), because you can't trust Google any more--full
of affiliate-led promotions.

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tbihl
Ironically, the solution is old Yahoo, back in the web directory days.

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tone
I'm actually really glad to have seen this and the comments. This has
something I've been prattling on about to anyone who will listen for the last
couple of years now. Glad to be somewhat vindicated!

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pictur
I think good content is more than shitty html code

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techslave
not only was this entirely predictable, it was actually predicted.

