People always adapt to work the system. It's "juking the stats" and IMO the thing that makes it so easy is that computers are great at correlation, but worthless when it comes to cause and effect.
Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily stupid.
I think the system that eventually topples Google will be something that's built with an expectation of having a certain level of human interaction. If I had to make a try at it right now I'd focus on local search; restaurants, events, groups, classifieds, etc. and build something that's sustainable via franchises. That way the human component would always be someone local to a community, they could take some of the profit, and they'd act as moderators / advisors for their community.
> Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good.
Ah, this explains why looking for reviews or comparisons for any type of product returns page after page of fake, single-purpose blogs now. You'd think Google would have wised up to this obvious, annoying SEO strategy by now.
Yep. There are multiple companies that build those blogs en masse. It's called Content Marketing. Those companies are always on the lookout for popular keywords (they use SEMrush, MOZ, etc) so they can build extremely shallow 1000-word blog posts around them for their customers.
They pay peanuts to freelancing writers that don't know much about the subject, and the only "references" they give for the article is from Wikipedia and other similar blog posts. Since some of those companies have control over thousands of (seemingly unconnected) customer blogs, they can link from one blog to another (and from social networks) to increase their PageRank score.
Some of the larger ones are even starting to employ machine learning to write articles, so expect even less quality from now on.
And Google doesn't care for one simple reason: search keywords captured by Content Marketing blogs are worth way more as AdWords.
It’s gotten to a point where for some topics I don’t even regard ‘the internet’ as a realistic source for information. Which is a tragedy, because it used to be. Almost anything related to health or medical topics, or consumer electronics is so inundated with blog spam that the signal to noise ratio is just too low to be useful. So many times I find myself 1/4 the way down an ‘article’ about a topic only to realize it’s nothing but regurgitated ‘content marketing’ spam.
Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily stupid.
I think the system that eventually topples Google will be something that's built with an expectation of having a certain level of human interaction. If I had to make a try at it right now I'd focus on local search; restaurants, events, groups, classifieds, etc. and build something that's sustainable via franchises. That way the human component would always be someone local to a community, they could take some of the profit, and they'd act as moderators / advisors for their community.
TLDR; You need more people involved.