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Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commerci

Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to target specific keywords. The fact that this works means that only well funded companies can succeed by bleeding money at the alter of page rank. In the old days we had paid search engines. Google promised to replace that by surfacing what you really want. But now we have a search engine that ranks results based on how much money you can spend on silly SEO rituals. Is that really any better?

donmcronald 6y ago
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. TLDR; You need more people involved.
- dmart 6y ago
  > 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.
  - ratww 6y ago
    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.
  - patentatt 6y ago
    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.
deckard1 6y ago
SEO is a racket. Google controls >90% of the search engine market, globally. That means you're always doing the cargo cult dance to appease the black box that is Google. Always on the verge of success, but never quite making it. Always suspicious of Google favoring advertisers in the organic results. Whether or not that is true is beside the point. Once you lose trust and once you're stuck in the land of abstractions and mirages, the conspiracy theory floodgates open. The cure is brutal transparency. But we'll never get that. Bitcoin's blockchain is that. The minute price fluctuations on Amazon? Not so much. You're always going to get screwed. That's the internet today. People complain about Twitter putting badges on Trump's tweets and cry "censorship" but ignore the fact that Facebook won't even show your posts to your friends (or vice versa) due to the engagement algorithms. Algorithms which you have zero insight into. Nudges and manipulation, everywhere.
Nasrudith 6y ago
You have it exactly backwards on several levels. Google has been fighting an arms race for decades against antisocial SEO. Google doesn't want people doing that at all both because of user experience and because they already sell the top slots as ads! SEO is a way to try to "cheap out" and get attention without continous ad spending and keyword selections. SEO existed before Google was ascendant - remember keyword peppering on irrelevant pages to get clicks on altavista and askjeeves? If someone says the internet is broken they always mean "It doesn't work how I want it to!" Can we bury that stupid meme already?
earthboundkid 6y ago
Yes, I've been saying for years that there's a fundamental contradiction in the paid search model. If the best content moves to the top organically, it doesn't need to pay, so only the not-best content will pay, which degrades search results. So, Google has perverse incentive to put the best content not at the top so it can force them to pay go get to the top. (The same dynamic applies on FB feeds, although the definition of "best" there is fuzzier.) The solution is that advertising against algorithmically moderated content should be illegal. It breaks the contradiction because now users will have to pay to get the top content, instead of content providers paying for visibility.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
> Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created. > In the old days we had paid search engines I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engine.
- effingwewt 6y ago
  It doesn't matter that Google created the monster that is SEO, thr fact is that it exists and it's how most people navigate the web. Google creating AMP further breaks it and gives Google even more control. Google is very much the yelp of the Internet. I understand where you are coming from being an 80s baby myself, however more and more young adults see google as the homepage of the internet, much as many now see Facebook as the internet to the point its where they consume most of their information. I screamed about all this when Google became an ad machine. I screamed about it when Microsoft released paid DLC for the Xbox 360. Some of us railed, but the children...the children grew up thinking it was all normal and now its just 'how the world is' (SAAS/advertising/misinformation) That's the real danger here. Companies outlast us and mold the next generation to see them as Deities of the world wide web. Also- I do not remember paid search engines either.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    I would prefer it if it was not necessary to learn "how to use Google". AMP makes that even more necessary than it used to be. I would prefer it if Google faced more real competition (DDG as I understand it is still fundamentally riding on the back of other lesser-used engines). But "fundamentally broken" is hyperbole. I think that "Deities" is also hyperbole. The people under 40 that I know regard Google as a corporation that does useful stuff, sometimes almost as if by magic, but not godlike.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    Google certainly didn't create SEO. In fact their original search engine was notable because the SEO companies had not figured it out and for a couple of years the results were head and shoulders above competitors like Altavista and Ask Jeeves. The only search engine that wasn't ruined by SEO was Archie. It was ruined by everybody shutting down their FTP sites.
luma 6y ago
You sound like you might not have been using search engines before Google, because SEO predates Google by... well since the invention of the search engine. People were gaming Yahoo, AltaVista, etc and selling their services to do so long before PageRank was a thing.

donmcronald 6y ago

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. TLDR; You need more people involved.

dmart 6y ago
> 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.
- ratww 6y ago
  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.
- patentatt 6y ago
  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.

deckard1 6y ago

SEO is a racket. Google controls >90% of the search engine market, globally. That means you're always doing the cargo cult dance to appease the black box that is Google. Always on the verge of success, but never quite making it. Always suspicious of Google favoring advertisers in the organic results. Whether or not that is true is beside the point. Once you lose trust and once you're stuck in the land of abstractions and mirages, the conspiracy theory floodgates open. The cure is brutal transparency. But we'll never get that. Bitcoin's blockchain is that. The minute price fluctuations on Amazon? Not so much. You're always going to get screwed. That's the internet today. People complain about Twitter putting badges on Trump's tweets and cry "censorship" but ignore the fact that Facebook won't even show your posts to your friends (or vice versa) due to the engagement algorithms. Algorithms which you have zero insight into. Nudges and manipulation, everywhere.

Nasrudith 6y ago

You have it exactly backwards on several levels. Google has been fighting an arms race for decades against antisocial SEO. Google doesn't want people doing that at all both because of user experience and because they already sell the top slots as ads! SEO is a way to try to "cheap out" and get attention without continous ad spending and keyword selections. SEO existed before Google was ascendant - remember keyword peppering on irrelevant pages to get clicks on altavista and askjeeves? If someone says the internet is broken they always mean "It doesn't work how I want it to!" Can we bury that stupid meme already?

earthboundkid 6y ago

Yes, I've been saying for years that there's a fundamental contradiction in the paid search model. If the best content moves to the top organically, it doesn't need to pay, so only the not-best content will pay, which degrades search results. So, Google has perverse incentive to put the best content not at the top so it can force them to pay go get to the top. (The same dynamic applies on FB feeds, although the definition of "best" there is fuzzier.) The solution is that advertising against algorithmically moderated content should be illegal. It breaks the contradiction because now users will have to pay to get the top content, instead of content providers paying for visibility.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

> Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. Total hyperbole. Google's handling of SEO at worst breaks a web experience that Google created. > In the old days we had paid search engines I've been using TCP/IP since 1985. I have been "on the Internet" since 1986. I created the first open website in the Pacific Northwest in 1993. I don't remember ever, not even once, using a paid search engine.

effingwewt 6y ago
It doesn't matter that Google created the monster that is SEO, thr fact is that it exists and it's how most people navigate the web. Google creating AMP further breaks it and gives Google even more control. Google is very much the yelp of the Internet. I understand where you are coming from being an 80s baby myself, however more and more young adults see google as the homepage of the internet, much as many now see Facebook as the internet to the point its where they consume most of their information. I screamed about all this when Google became an ad machine. I screamed about it when Microsoft released paid DLC for the Xbox 360. Some of us railed, but the children...the children grew up thinking it was all normal and now its just 'how the world is' (SAAS/advertising/misinformation) That's the real danger here. Companies outlast us and mold the next generation to see them as Deities of the world wide web. Also- I do not remember paid search engines either.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  I would prefer it if it was not necessary to learn "how to use Google". AMP makes that even more necessary than it used to be. I would prefer it if Google faced more real competition (DDG as I understand it is still fundamentally riding on the back of other lesser-used engines). But "fundamentally broken" is hyperbole. I think that "Deities" is also hyperbole. The people under 40 that I know regard Google as a corporation that does useful stuff, sometimes almost as if by magic, but not godlike.
- jandrese 6y ago
  Google certainly didn't create SEO. In fact their original search engine was notable because the SEO companies had not figured it out and for a couple of years the results were head and shoulders above competitors like Altavista and Ask Jeeves. The only search engine that wasn't ruined by SEO was Archie. It was ruined by everybody shutting down their FTP sites.

luma 6y ago

You sound like you might not have been using search engines before Google, because SEO predates Google by... well since the invention of the search engine. People were gaming Yahoo, AltaVista, etc and selling their services to do so long before PageRank was a thing.