2 ms·

This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching for “best intro <power tool>“ yields a bunch of low quality SEO that’s just pulled from Amazon.

This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching for “best intro <power tool>“ yields a bunch of low quality SEO that’s just pulled from Amazon. I think the interesting question is this: why is this happening? There’s always been a battle between Google and SEO black hats, but I can’t remember the last time it got this bad. Is Google just temporarily losing, or have they lost the will to fix this at all?

Volker_W 5y ago
> This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching for “best intro <power tool>“ yields a bunch of low quality SEO that’s just pulled from Amazon. Cannot reproduce.
yourapostasy 5y ago
I've given up using Google or any search engine for that matter when it comes to tools purchasing decisions (other product categories too, for that matter). First use, I buy from Hazard Fright. If it gets janky on first use or wears out with enough use, I search in the forums where the trades hang out in discussing what they use, wince while reaching into my wallet, and pay for a built-for-business grade tool. There are a few YouTube channels I refer to as well (examples are Project Farm and Mike Festiva) for tools and consumables recommendations. I always observe what tools trades carry when they work on my properties, and chat with them over the drinks and snacks I offer them, on what they like and don't like. That figures heavily into my decisions. Google's main purpose these days for me is non-mainstream, far niche searches. I've taken to looking into deploying my own ArchiveBox to just store my own curated search results that I like. When I initially noticed the SEO spam around 20 years ago, I began to prepare for it by manually saving into text files the page links off of search results that I used, and that has helped me a lot. Ironically, I'm building my own personal Yahoo Directory. I don't see any solution on the horizon to SEO pollution getting better, so I want to scale up my solution.

Volker_W 5y ago

> This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching for “best intro <power tool>“ yields a bunch of low quality SEO that’s just pulled from Amazon. Cannot reproduce.

yourapostasy 5y ago

I've given up using Google or any search engine for that matter when it comes to tools purchasing decisions (other product categories too, for that matter). First use, I buy from Hazard Fright. If it gets janky on first use or wears out with enough use, I search in the forums where the trades hang out in discussing what they use, wince while reaching into my wallet, and pay for a built-for-business grade tool. There are a few YouTube channels I refer to as well (examples are Project Farm and Mike Festiva) for tools and consumables recommendations. I always observe what tools trades carry when they work on my properties, and chat with them over the drinks and snacks I offer them, on what they like and don't like. That figures heavily into my decisions. Google's main purpose these days for me is non-mainstream, far niche searches. I've taken to looking into deploying my own ArchiveBox to just store my own curated search results that I like. When I initially noticed the SEO spam around 20 years ago, I began to prepare for it by manually saving into text files the page links off of search results that I used, and that has helped me a lot. Ironically, I'm building my own personal Yahoo Directory. I don't see any solution on the horizon to SEO pollution getting better, so I want to scale up my solution.