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The SEO toxic sludge has become so pervasive that I can't trust any search these days. Here's an example from just last week. I was searching for the official
by bostik 7y ago
The SEO toxic sludge has become so pervasive that I can't trust any search these days. Here's an example from just last week.
I was searching for the official AWS security certificates (namely, for ISO27001), which AWS neatly publishes on their site. Even for something that specific, the real AWS certification page was at the bottom of the first Google result page. Everything above it was from various random consulting outfits, all trying to sell their "expertise".
When search terms for a company's official security certificate are poisoned with SEO, we know the well has been thoroughly poisoned.
- Eridrus 7y agoThanks for adding an actual example to this thread. I haven't personally noticed search get worse, so I appreciate it. Anyway, I typed in your query " IS027001", and you're right, the AWS result is at the very bottom of the first page on mobile. But if you search "AWS IS027001" it's at the very top. But IS027001 is not an AWS-specific thing, and the results above it are about the standard. It would seem equally bad to return AWS's product pages to somebody looking for information about the standard. There's definitely an argument that there are too many results from random websites satisfying the "general information about this standard" intent and it would be good if google could guess what everyone wanted simultaneously, but the query is pretty ambiguous...