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I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and

by javchz 5y ago

I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance. Right now SEO it's an arms race between google and every SEO agencies, with a keyword being attached to some company that may have 0 relevance to the user. Doesn't help, that depending on the query, the first results are ads only superficially related. You can search for the name of a popular brand of a car/hotel/insurance, and the first results are the competitors. If you don't want to be below the fold, you need to pay, even if your website it's exactly what the user it's looking for.

y42 5y ago
That would not help. Those kind of effects are inherent in the system. As long as Visitsv lead to any kind of revenue, no matter if by Ad Impressions or Affiliate Programms or whatever, there exists a motivation and people will try to drag visitors to their sites. You will have to remove eCommerce from the Internet to fix that.
throw_m239339 5y ago
> I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance. It was never the case. As soon as google started to be popular, people were hired to manipulate its search results. "Natural" SEO was never a thing. You always had to use shady tactics in order to get a good ranking because everybody was doing the same.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  Even before Google, people would stuff the bottom of their page with black on black keyword stuffing to game Altavista
  - oriolid 5y ago
    This exactly. Google was an almost overnight success because in the beginning it gave much more useful results than Altavista and others even when they had indexed a small fraction of what Altavista had.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  The internet grew up. I want to hate Google as much as the next guy but it is not their fault that money has corrupted it. In that sense Google's monopoly is actually preferable for marketeers. It would be a lot harder to manipulate search engine results if the public was split among 20 of them.

by javchz 5y ago

y42 5y ago

That would not help. Those kind of effects are inherent in the system. As long as Visitsv lead to any kind of revenue, no matter if by Ad Impressions or Affiliate Programms or whatever, there exists a motivation and people will try to drag visitors to their sites. You will have to remove eCommerce from the Internet to fix that.

throw_m239339 5y ago

> I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance. It was never the case. As soon as google started to be popular, people were hired to manipulate its search results. "Natural" SEO was never a thing. You always had to use shady tactics in order to get a good ranking because everybody was doing the same.

kalleboo 5y ago
Even before Google, people would stuff the bottom of their page with black on black keyword stuffing to game Altavista
- oriolid 5y ago
  This exactly. Google was an almost overnight success because in the beginning it gave much more useful results than Altavista and others even when they had indexed a small fraction of what Altavista had.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
The internet grew up. I want to hate Google as much as the next guy but it is not their fault that money has corrupted it. In that sense Google's monopoly is actually preferable for marketeers. It would be a lot harder to manipulate search engine results if the public was split among 20 of them.