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Part of the problem is that their algorithm has become weighted against blogs and personal websites. > Rumors spread that large link pages (for surfing) might

Part of the problem is that their algorithm has become weighted against blogs and personal websites. > Rumors spread that large link pages (for surfing) might be considered “link farms” (and yes on SEO sites they were but these things eventually trickle down to little personal site webmasters too) so these started to be phased out. Then the worry was Blogrolls might be considered link farms so they slowly started to be phased out. Then the biggie: when Google deliberately filtered out all the free hosted sites from the SERP’s (they were not removed completely just sent back to page 10 or so of the Google SERP’s) and traffic to Tripod and Geocities plummeted. Why? Because they were taking up space in the first 20 organic returns knocking out corporate and commercial sites and the sites likely to become paying customers were complaining. https://ramblinggit.com/2018/08/when-the-social-silos-fall/ https://ramblinggit.com/2018/08/when-the-social-silos-fall/ SEO seems to have become a huge obstacle course that smaller websites can't play.

benologist 8y ago
That's exactly what it is, and Google's also incentivizing many low-quality sites to engage disproportionately in SEO to boost their Google Adsense earnings too.
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
You're jumping from describing observable results to a state of mind or motive which you can't observe. > Then the worry was Blogrolls might be considered link farms so they slowly started to be phased out. Then the biggie: when Google deliberately filtered out all the free hosted sites from the SERP’s... That's all observable fact. Why? Because they were taking up space in the first 20 organic returns knocking out corporate and commercial sites and the sites likely to become paying customers were complaining. I think the more reasonable, less diabolical motive was that the blogs and free hosted sites were largely link farms that no one wanted to visit. It sucks for the few legitimate pages on those platforms, but when most of the legitimate page is the rare gem in a minefield of automated copies of other blogs, just with SEO links and ads inserted. It's like a comments section: without moderation or captchas or both, a "thriving local community" on, say, a small town news site can be overwhelmed by automated pharmaceuticals spam. Then the newspaper kills the comment section, not out of any malice towards the original community but because they don't want to deal with the spam. And yeah, dealing with spam and black hat SEO does take resources. If you (or worse, your chosen blog host) don't keep the weeds down, soon your pasture will be overrun and burned off.
- kickscondor 8y ago
  I absolutely agree with you that whether Google is intentionally diabolical or not is up in the air. My reason for quoting Brad there is to succinctly recount a history where Google has been a menace (deliberate or not) to individual blogs and websites. Blog rolls were absolutely a great way to discover new blogs and were hardly “link farms” but were an incredibly valuable resource. (An equivalent to modern friend lists.) Where I don’t agree with you is in the portrayal of the Web as largely comprised of link farms and “few legitimate pages”. I spend a lot of my time cataloging the hidden corners of the Web and it is mostly individuals working on their personal Web projects. Spam is simple to identify (much more so than ‘clickbait’) and many of the reasons people don’t read personal websites any more isn’t because interesting and mind-blowing projects on the Web are too rare. (I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I feel like they are more common on the Web than on social media.)
  - en-us 8y ago
    > I spend a lot of my time cataloging the hidden corners of the Web and it is mostly individuals working on their personal Web projects. That sounds interesting. Do you have a list of some interesting projects that you're willing to share?
    - kickscondor 8y ago
      I catalog my findings on my blog: https://www.kickscondor.com/ https://www.kickscondor.com/ and I have a directory of my favorites: https://href.cool/ https://href.cool/. Thankyou for asking. If you know of any sweet links, pass them along!
      - en-us 8y ago
        Awesome, thanks for sharing!
- sodosopa 8y ago
  I wish they would filter out Pinterest by default (instead of adding -pinterest), they're worse than old Blogrolls.
ashelmire 8y ago
> SEO seems to have become a huge obstacle course that smaller websites can't play. Absolutely right. I recently started a blog, and was disheartened to learn that I have sign up for accounts with several search engines, conform to their standards and rules, give them a bunch of data... and still sometimes have mysterious issues with indexing with no real recourse. How much time and effort do I really want to spend to play the seo game? I have a job, projects, and hobbies, I don't have the time or patience to play their game of "let's fuck with things randomly until you get indexed and ranked higher". That was fun for a few hours, but I'm done with it.
- kickscondor 8y ago
  If you decide to start a blog again, please contact me - I will list you in my monthly "href hunt" - a raw dump of newly discovered sites. And I can point you to directories like personalsit.es that list blogs. And, of course, consider having a blogroll of the sites you follow, which is all of our little way of contributing to the effort of finding each other. :)
  - ashelmire 8y ago
    I plan on posting some more soon; work just got crazy for a bit. And that's a good idea, I should provide links to blogs I follow!
revvx 8y ago
It's not Google's fault this time. The problem is that Blogspam is now a (legitimate) industry much bigger than Google can manage. Google Search became a playground for marketing firms to dump content made by low-paid freelancers with algorithmically chosen keywords, links and headers. It's SEO on large scale. Everything is monitored via analytics and automatically posted to Wordpress. Every time Google tweaks its algorithm to catch it, they're able to A-B test and then change thousands of texts all at once. Personal blogs can't even dream about competing with that. In fact, those companies are actively competing with personal blogs by themselves: via tools like SEMRush and social media monitoring, they know which blogs are trending and use their tools to produce copycat content re-written by freelancers and powered by their SEO machine. I know a startup that is churning 10 thousand blogposts per day on clients blogs, each costing from 2 to 5 dollars for a freelancer to write according to algorithmically defined parameters. Just wait until they get posts written via OpenAI-style machine learning: the quality will be even lower. Not only that: there's no need for black hat SEO anymore. Blogposts from random clients have links to others clients blogs, and it is algorithmically generated in order to maximize views and satisfy Google's algorithm. They have a gigantic pool of seemingly unconnected blogs to link to, so why not use it. The irony is that companies buy this kind of blogspam to skip paying AdSense. Why pay when you can get organic search results? So not only they're damaging the usefulness of the SERP, they're directly eating Google's bottom line. These blogs also have ZERO paid advertising inside them, since they're advertising themselves. That's the reason Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yandex still have "old web" results. That puts Google in a very difficult position and IMO they're not wrong to fight it.
- kickscondor 8y ago
  Well, I disagree. (Though I think your record of things is correct!) Certainly if you look at this as a bot war then Google's actions make sense: we need our bots to outsmart the 'bots' (human bots even!) that are writing blogs. But look at it another way: you have lots of humans writing - and it's all of varying quality. Why not let the humans decide what's good? The early Web was curated by humans, who kept directories, Smart.com 'expert' pages, websites and blogrolls that tried to show where quality could be found. Google's bot war (and the idea that Google is the sole authority on quality) eliminated these valuable resources as collateral damage.
hnick 8y ago
A friend spoke to an SEO analyst just yesterday and it seems the counterplay is to add "recency" to your posts. If you have an older post that's great but not changed, it'll become less prominent. So go in, edit in some changes, and now it's fresh and ready to be indexed prominently again. If this is how it goes, I guess it helps in a way. The articles we care about get attention and don't drop off. But there's so much of the old web we might lose in the haystack.

benologist 8y ago

That's exactly what it is, and Google's also incentivizing many low-quality sites to engage disproportionately in SEO to boost their Google Adsense earnings too.

LeifCarrotson 8y ago

You're jumping from describing observable results to a state of mind or motive which you can't observe. > Then the worry was Blogrolls might be considered link farms so they slowly started to be phased out. Then the biggie: when Google deliberately filtered out all the free hosted sites from the SERP’s... That's all observable fact. Why? Because they were taking up space in the first 20 organic returns knocking out corporate and commercial sites and the sites likely to become paying customers were complaining. I think the more reasonable, less diabolical motive was that the blogs and free hosted sites were largely link farms that no one wanted to visit. It sucks for the few legitimate pages on those platforms, but when most of the legitimate page is the rare gem in a minefield of automated copies of other blogs, just with SEO links and ads inserted. It's like a comments section: without moderation or captchas or both, a "thriving local community" on, say, a small town news site can be overwhelmed by automated pharmaceuticals spam. Then the newspaper kills the comment section, not out of any malice towards the original community but because they don't want to deal with the spam. And yeah, dealing with spam and black hat SEO does take resources. If you (or worse, your chosen blog host) don't keep the weeds down, soon your pasture will be overrun and burned off.

kickscondor 8y ago
I absolutely agree with you that whether Google is intentionally diabolical or not is up in the air. My reason for quoting Brad there is to succinctly recount a history where Google has been a menace (deliberate or not) to individual blogs and websites. Blog rolls were absolutely a great way to discover new blogs and were hardly “link farms” but were an incredibly valuable resource. (An equivalent to modern friend lists.) Where I don’t agree with you is in the portrayal of the Web as largely comprised of link farms and “few legitimate pages”. I spend a lot of my time cataloging the hidden corners of the Web and it is mostly individuals working on their personal Web projects. Spam is simple to identify (much more so than ‘clickbait’) and many of the reasons people don’t read personal websites any more isn’t because interesting and mind-blowing projects on the Web are too rare. (I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I feel like they are more common on the Web than on social media.)
- en-us 8y ago
  > I spend a lot of my time cataloging the hidden corners of the Web and it is mostly individuals working on their personal Web projects. That sounds interesting. Do you have a list of some interesting projects that you're willing to share?
  - kickscondor 8y ago
    I catalog my findings on my blog: https://www.kickscondor.com/ https://www.kickscondor.com/ and I have a directory of my favorites: https://href.cool/ https://href.cool/. Thankyou for asking. If you know of any sweet links, pass them along!
    - en-us 8y ago
      Awesome, thanks for sharing!
sodosopa 8y ago
I wish they would filter out Pinterest by default (instead of adding -pinterest), they're worse than old Blogrolls.

ashelmire 8y ago

> SEO seems to have become a huge obstacle course that smaller websites can't play. Absolutely right. I recently started a blog, and was disheartened to learn that I have sign up for accounts with several search engines, conform to their standards and rules, give them a bunch of data... and still sometimes have mysterious issues with indexing with no real recourse. How much time and effort do I really want to spend to play the seo game? I have a job, projects, and hobbies, I don't have the time or patience to play their game of "let's fuck with things randomly until you get indexed and ranked higher". That was fun for a few hours, but I'm done with it.

kickscondor 8y ago
If you decide to start a blog again, please contact me - I will list you in my monthly "href hunt" - a raw dump of newly discovered sites. And I can point you to directories like personalsit.es that list blogs. And, of course, consider having a blogroll of the sites you follow, which is all of our little way of contributing to the effort of finding each other. :)
- ashelmire 8y ago
  I plan on posting some more soon; work just got crazy for a bit. And that's a good idea, I should provide links to blogs I follow!

revvx 8y ago

It's not Google's fault this time. The problem is that Blogspam is now a (legitimate) industry much bigger than Google can manage. Google Search became a playground for marketing firms to dump content made by low-paid freelancers with algorithmically chosen keywords, links and headers. It's SEO on large scale. Everything is monitored via analytics and automatically posted to Wordpress. Every time Google tweaks its algorithm to catch it, they're able to A-B test and then change thousands of texts all at once. Personal blogs can't even dream about competing with that. In fact, those companies are actively competing with personal blogs by themselves: via tools like SEMRush and social media monitoring, they know which blogs are trending and use their tools to produce copycat content re-written by freelancers and powered by their SEO machine. I know a startup that is churning 10 thousand blogposts per day on clients blogs, each costing from 2 to 5 dollars for a freelancer to write according to algorithmically defined parameters. Just wait until they get posts written via OpenAI-style machine learning: the quality will be even lower. Not only that: there's no need for black hat SEO anymore. Blogposts from random clients have links to others clients blogs, and it is algorithmically generated in order to maximize views and satisfy Google's algorithm. They have a gigantic pool of seemingly unconnected blogs to link to, so why not use it. The irony is that companies buy this kind of blogspam to skip paying AdSense. Why pay when you can get organic search results? So not only they're damaging the usefulness of the SERP, they're directly eating Google's bottom line. These blogs also have ZERO paid advertising inside them, since they're advertising themselves. That's the reason Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yandex still have "old web" results. That puts Google in a very difficult position and IMO they're not wrong to fight it.

kickscondor 8y ago
Well, I disagree. (Though I think your record of things is correct!) Certainly if you look at this as a bot war then Google's actions make sense: we need our bots to outsmart the 'bots' (human bots even!) that are writing blogs. But look at it another way: you have lots of humans writing - and it's all of varying quality. Why not let the humans decide what's good? The early Web was curated by humans, who kept directories, Smart.com 'expert' pages, websites and blogrolls that tried to show where quality could be found. Google's bot war (and the idea that Google is the sole authority on quality) eliminated these valuable resources as collateral damage.

hnick 8y ago

A friend spoke to an SEO analyst just yesterday and it seems the counterplay is to add "recency" to your posts. If you have an older post that's great but not changed, it'll become less prominent. So go in, edit in some changes, and now it's fresh and ready to be indexed prominently again. If this is how it goes, I guess it helps in a way. The articles we care about get attention and don't drop off. But there's so much of the old web we might lose in the haystack.