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How SEO Ruined the Internet

479 points by midef 6y ago

bb123 6y ago
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?
- pacamara619 6y ago
  I find it really hard to believe that you don't know any other search engines than goolag and haven't tried them.
- mcv 6y ago
  Well, there are other search engines of course, and sometimes they're slightly better. Not great, though. I'm really itching to start writing my own search engine now.
- ShorsHammer 6y ago
  This is pertinent and don't think the easy answer is yes, as soon as any other search engine gets big enough the same gaming will occur.
- Cyberdog 6y ago
  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).
thawaway1837 6y ago
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.
mcv 6y ago
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.
- midef 6y ago
  I like playing around with "Million Short" - https://millionshort.com https://millionshort.com. It's a search engine that lets you logarithmically filter-out the top websites. It isn't perfect, of course, but its a fun way to discover things.
  - mcv 6y ago
    That is a fantastic idea. Of course some of those top sites, especially the blogging and self-hosting platforms, can still contain obscure stuff that might be just what I'm looking for.
  - kilroy123 6y ago
    I love the idea and have tried to use their service a number of times over the years. I've never been terribly happy with the results.
- netsharc 6y ago
  I have another "Google is shit now" anecdote: a few months ago I wanted to look up some trivia for the movie "Lord of War". I entered this term in Google, and since there was a game that was just released, it responded with "Showing you results for 'God of War'". No results on the front page had anything related to the Nic Cage movie.
haybanusa 6y ago
I think Google is to blame for allowing this.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  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."
silexia 6y ago
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.
- sumo89 6y ago
  I agree, it's easy to hate on the current system and I think the ads are getting way too similar to the real results now. But all those websites that have a massive list of names/place at the bottom just to come higher up the search, that was the real worst time. When you'd search "Handyman in Leeds" and the top results would be for a company that isn't even in the right location but was big enough to list highly and had "Handyman in Leeds" in hidden text at the bottom of the page.
- Cyberdog 6y ago
  > 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…
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways. When a site is acting up like that I just click and hold, and this brings up an extended list of previous pages. I kinda assume everyone knew about that feature; it seems to work in all major browsers.
sub7 6y ago
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 6y ago
  >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."
thrwwy9999534 6y ago
Would be good to have search engine algorithm that searches on visible content only and places anything with ads and trackers last.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  That would require the search engine itself to not be funded by those same ads.
pal_9000 6y ago
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 6y ago
  How does Google determine bounce rate? That I click on another search result after I click on the first one?
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
    - DeathArrow 6y ago
      But website began splitting small articles in 20 pages you have to click trough instead of scroll and they disable back button. I rather open a new tab from search results and close it instead of clicking the link and going back. I imagine many people do that.
RobertoG 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- meesterdude 6y ago
  this x1000! By pandering to the algorithm of google, a lot of great content has become watered down, softened, or impacted in other ways. Titles have to be worded a certain way, article length has to be a certain length... hoping someone else chimes in with other thoughts because I used to know more about this, and SEO cheapening quality content was one of the key takeaways I had.
  - owlninja 6y ago
    Recipe blogs are the worst! Just get to the goods already!
    - awithrow 6y ago
      Many now have an anchor directly to the recipe. I try to book mark those so I don't have to read about the author pontificating on the changing of the seasons or how an ingredient in the dish reminds them of childhood for the 800th time.
    - taberiand 6y ago
      It's like we've flipped APIs on their heads - humans use tools to obtain the minimal data (just the recipe), while the bots make requests and receive the whole dump of pointless, extraneous fluff in return.
ThePhysicist 6y ago
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.
monk_e_boy 6y ago
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.
theklub 6y ago
Just look up a recipe for something and this fact instantly becomes apparent
blunte 6y ago
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).
- krapp 6y ago
  > The situation has gotten so dismal that I often have to look past page 1, and sometimes page 2 of search results. That's hardly dismal. That not even mildly inconvenient.
- rwmurrayVT 6y ago
  The r/juststart crown strikes again.
- inshadows 6y ago
  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).
laichzeit0 6y ago
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.
pictur 6y ago
I think good content is more than shitty html code
cousin_it 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
Jaruzel 6y ago
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.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I am. They never seem to know where you are in a way that would actually be useful to you, but always do for their own creepy tracking reasons.
- helij 6y ago
  I am not logged in and I always get UK search results even if I search on google.com.
- koyote 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
durnygbur 6y ago
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!
- handsomechad 6y ago
  do you have a link to this solution
  - durnygbur 6y ago
    ImageMagick and Tesseract for OCR-ing each page of a PDF into a separate text file (through TIFF image format, disregard the huge TIFFs afterwards), private git repos for hosting, then ag/grep for searching. Not as easy to find the phrase back in PDF as with eg. Google Books, but then GB with copyright related content restrictions is useless most of the time.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  How did you acquire the books? Are they in the public domain, or did you have to buy them? In either case is there a place to acquire/buy these books massively or did you do it one by one manually?
  - durnygbur 6y ago
    Whichever most convenient way to obtain a full restriction-free PDF of a book. Fetched one by one through various channels in my case. Very few are in the public domain, if any. BTW one can do the same with academic publications, device manuals, or whatever else content available in PDF.
- FiatLuxDave 6y ago
  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.
leejoramo 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Ad revenue.
      - runxel 6y ago
        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".
calibas 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Or rather we are the victims of their success.
  - calibas 6y ago
    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.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  I wonder if some real competition in search would help things. It might be harder to create SEO that “fools” a handful of different search engines than just creating quality content. I’m not sure how we’ve come to accept a near total monopoly on search so willingly.
tone 6y ago
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!
Priem19 6y ago
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 6y ago
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.
jedberg 6y ago
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 6y ago
  It's good ol' Goodhart's Law, all over again.
trey-jones 6y ago
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.
tqi 6y ago
> 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.
projomni 6y ago
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.
beezle 6y ago
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 6y ago
  This is the result of Google trying to compete with Facebook. The search results page is their answer to the news feed.
Animats 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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-updates https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-algorithm... - rolling out every month or so are notoriously a black box and frustrate SEOs to no end!
  - droopyEyelids 6y ago
    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.
Gatsky 6y ago
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.
grwthckrmstr 6y ago
For many of my searches, I simply type "search term xyz Reddit" to find more relevant results than what Google would throw at me.
alexmingoia 6y ago
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.
- njsubedi 6y ago
  The upvotes on this post say something else. Personally, I value the discussion more than the post itself, so as long as there's a healthy discussion the post checks out.
- kabacha 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  So if my car breaks I am not supposed to say it is broken unless I provide detailed instructions on how to fix it and on how a car should be engineered to avoid being broken?
screye 6y ago
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.
plerpin 6y ago
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.
techslave 6y ago
not only was this entirely predictable, it was actually predicted.
kabacha 6y ago
> 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.
justlexi93 6y ago
I mean yes SEO doesn’t allow for as simple entry into a market, it is something that’s essential for starting an online business now, but for the most part it’s fair. For information searching that’s all just anecdotal, while it’s true that SOME sites may attempt to “rewrite history,”I highly doubt they make up even 1% of the entire internet. So maybe its inconveniencing to someone who doesn’t know how to properly search for what they’re looking for beyond typing in words and getting mad when the can’t find exactly what they want in the first page, but in no way is it “ruining the internet.” Also why did you post this to an economy subreddit??
DeathArrow 6y ago
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.
DeathArrow 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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-decentralized-public-social-network-128b6c11fd24 https://medium.com/@TautviIas/it-is-time-to-create-a-decentr...
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I wonder if Medium would get included in the index.
DeathArrow 6y ago
Maybe it's time for a search engine developed and ran by the community in the same way Wikipedia is.
rchaud 6y ago
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 6y ago
  > 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:"?
tbihl 6y ago
Ironically, the solution is old Yahoo, back in the web directory days.

479 points by midef 6y ago

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?

pacamara619 6y ago
I find it really hard to believe that you don't know any other search engines than goolag and haven't tried them.
mcv 6y ago
Well, there are other search engines of course, and sometimes they're slightly better. Not great, though. I'm really itching to start writing my own search engine now.
ShorsHammer 6y ago
This is pertinent and don't think the easy answer is yes, as soon as any other search engine gets big enough the same gaming will occur.
Cyberdog 6y ago
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).

thawaway1837 6y ago

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.

mcv 6y ago

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.

midef 6y ago
I like playing around with "Million Short" - https://millionshort.com https://millionshort.com. It's a search engine that lets you logarithmically filter-out the top websites. It isn't perfect, of course, but its a fun way to discover things.
- mcv 6y ago
  That is a fantastic idea. Of course some of those top sites, especially the blogging and self-hosting platforms, can still contain obscure stuff that might be just what I'm looking for.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  I love the idea and have tried to use their service a number of times over the years. I've never been terribly happy with the results.
netsharc 6y ago
I have another "Google is shit now" anecdote: a few months ago I wanted to look up some trivia for the movie "Lord of War". I entered this term in Google, and since there was a game that was just released, it responded with "Showing you results for 'God of War'". No results on the front page had anything related to the Nic Cage movie.

haybanusa 6y ago

I think Google is to blame for allowing this.

ForHackernews 6y ago
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."

silexia 6y ago

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.

sumo89 6y ago
I agree, it's easy to hate on the current system and I think the ads are getting way too similar to the real results now. But all those websites that have a massive list of names/place at the bottom just to come higher up the search, that was the real worst time. When you'd search "Handyman in Leeds" and the top results would be for a company that isn't even in the right location but was big enough to list highly and had "Handyman in Leeds" in hidden text at the bottom of the page.
Cyberdog 6y ago
> 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…
zozbot234 6y ago
> and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways. When a site is acting up like that I just click and hold, and this brings up an extended list of previous pages. I kinda assume everyone knew about that feature; it seems to work in all major browsers.

sub7 6y ago

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 6y ago
>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."

thrwwy9999534 6y ago

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

Nextgrid 6y ago
That would require the search engine itself to not be funded by those same ads.

pal_9000 6y ago

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 6y ago
How does Google determine bounce rate? That I click on another search result after I click on the first one?
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
  - DeathArrow 6y ago
    But website began splitting small articles in 20 pages you have to click trough instead of scroll and they disable back button. I rather open a new tab from search results and close it instead of clicking the link and going back. I imagine many people do that.

RobertoG 6y ago

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.

deleted 6y ago
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meesterdude 6y ago
this x1000! By pandering to the algorithm of google, a lot of great content has become watered down, softened, or impacted in other ways. Titles have to be worded a certain way, article length has to be a certain length... hoping someone else chimes in with other thoughts because I used to know more about this, and SEO cheapening quality content was one of the key takeaways I had.
- owlninja 6y ago
  Recipe blogs are the worst! Just get to the goods already!
  - awithrow 6y ago
    Many now have an anchor directly to the recipe. I try to book mark those so I don't have to read about the author pontificating on the changing of the seasons or how an ingredient in the dish reminds them of childhood for the 800th time.
  - taberiand 6y ago
    It's like we've flipped APIs on their heads - humans use tools to obtain the minimal data (just the recipe), while the bots make requests and receive the whole dump of pointless, extraneous fluff in return.

ThePhysicist 6y ago

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.

monk_e_boy 6y ago

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.

theklub 6y ago

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

blunte 6y ago

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).

krapp 6y ago
> The situation has gotten so dismal that I often have to look past page 1, and sometimes page 2 of search results. That's hardly dismal. That not even mildly inconvenient.
rwmurrayVT 6y ago
The r/juststart crown strikes again.
inshadows 6y ago
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).

laichzeit0 6y ago

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.

pictur 6y ago

I think good content is more than shitty html code

cousin_it 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.

Jaruzel 6y ago

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.

goatinaboat 6y ago
Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I am. They never seem to know where you are in a way that would actually be useful to you, but always do for their own creepy tracking reasons.
helij 6y ago
I am not logged in and I always get UK search results even if I search on google.com.
koyote 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.

durnygbur 6y ago

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!

handsomechad 6y ago
do you have a link to this solution
- durnygbur 6y ago
  ImageMagick and Tesseract for OCR-ing each page of a PDF into a separate text file (through TIFF image format, disregard the huge TIFFs afterwards), private git repos for hosting, then ag/grep for searching. Not as easy to find the phrase back in PDF as with eg. Google Books, but then GB with copyright related content restrictions is useless most of the time.
Nextgrid 6y ago
How did you acquire the books? Are they in the public domain, or did you have to buy them? In either case is there a place to acquire/buy these books massively or did you do it one by one manually?
- durnygbur 6y ago
  Whichever most convenient way to obtain a full restriction-free PDF of a book. Fetched one by one through various channels in my case. Very few are in the public domain, if any. BTW one can do the same with academic publications, device manuals, or whatever else content available in PDF.
FiatLuxDave 6y ago
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.

leejoramo 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Ad revenue.
    - runxel 6y ago
      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".

calibas 6y ago

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 6y ago
Or rather we are the victims of their success.
- calibas 6y ago
  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.
AlexandrB 6y ago
I wonder if some real competition in search would help things. It might be harder to create SEO that “fools” a handful of different search engines than just creating quality content. I’m not sure how we’ve come to accept a near total monopoly on search so willingly.

tone 6y ago

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!

Priem19 6y ago

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 6y ago

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.

jedberg 6y ago

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 6y ago
It's good ol' Goodhart's Law, all over again.

trey-jones 6y ago

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.

tqi 6y ago

> 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.

projomni 6y ago

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.

beezle 6y ago

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 6y ago
This is the result of Google trying to compete with Facebook. The search results page is their answer to the news feed.

Animats 6y ago

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 6y ago
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-updates https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-algorithm... - rolling out every month or so are notoriously a black box and frustrate SEOs to no end!
- droopyEyelids 6y ago
  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.

Gatsky 6y ago

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.

grwthckrmstr 6y ago

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

alexmingoia 6y ago

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.

njsubedi 6y ago
The upvotes on this post say something else. Personally, I value the discussion more than the post itself, so as long as there's a healthy discussion the post checks out.
kabacha 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
DeathArrow 6y ago
So if my car breaks I am not supposed to say it is broken unless I provide detailed instructions on how to fix it and on how a car should be engineered to avoid being broken?

screye 6y ago

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.

plerpin 6y ago

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.

techslave 6y ago

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

kabacha 6y ago

> 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.

justlexi93 6y ago

I mean yes SEO doesn’t allow for as simple entry into a market, it is something that’s essential for starting an online business now, but for the most part it’s fair. For information searching that’s all just anecdotal, while it’s true that SOME sites may attempt to “rewrite history,”I highly doubt they make up even 1% of the entire internet. So maybe its inconveniencing to someone who doesn’t know how to properly search for what they’re looking for beyond typing in words and getting mad when the can’t find exactly what they want in the first page, but in no way is it “ruining the internet.” Also why did you post this to an economy subreddit??

DeathArrow 6y ago

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.

DeathArrow 6y ago

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 6y ago
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-decentralized-public-social-network-128b6c11fd24 https://medium.com/@TautviIas/it-is-time-to-create-a-decentr...
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I wonder if Medium would get included in the index.

DeathArrow 6y ago

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

rchaud 6y ago

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 6y ago
> 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:"?

tbihl 6y ago

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