4 ms·
Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if Google did better at distinguishing between seo stuffing content farms and actual websites.
by walrus01 5y ago
Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if Google did better at distinguishing between seo stuffing content farms and actual websites.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- elliekelly 5y agoI don’t understand why Google doesn’t make an effort to do this? Aren’t these SEO “content” people a competitor, of sorts?
- bell-cot 5y agoI'd call most of them "saboteurs", not "competitors".
- phh 5y agoGoogle's market is ads. SEO "content"'s market is ads. They are definitely competing.
- cavisne 5y agoI think they would have seen this coming, they just couldn't do anything about it. The rise of social media has moved most human generated content onto a few platforms, most of whom don't let Google index them (facebook being the main one). They probably need to figure out how to pull information out of youtube (which there seem to be some initial efforts at). However they might already be in trouble there, as TikTok is growing a huge archive of 20 second answers to common queries.
- bombcar 5y agoThe websites are stuffed full of ads ... Google ads. Where's the incentive to change? They don't pay, their customers do.
- vikingerik 5y agoThey do make an effort. They're just losing the arms race.
- AlwaysRock 5y agoBut they sell ads to those content farms.
- charlieyu1 5y agoAds are tagged with ads. Poor content not tagged ads means Google isn't paid on that.
- jahewson 5y agoIf the content farm displays ads from Doubleclick then Google still gets paid.
- charlieyu1 5y agoAs Diablo 2 released a remaster this year, it is sad to see that old websites with comprehensive information from 20 years ago are gradually replaced by the same three or four SEO optimised content farms in the top of Google search results.
- celdon25 5y ago“Worse is better”
- drusepth 5y agoSame with the Chrono Cross remaster this weekend: I'm already inundated with content farms spewing (bad) rehashes of tutorials from 20 years ago. We've come a long way from text-only 200-page gameFAQ .txt tutorials to more-ads-on-the-page-than-text listicles that split paragraphs of content over a slideshow of multiple pages in order to run even more ads.
- orlp 5y agoHoly shit this comment resonates so much with me. It used to be that you could Google something about your game and find a 150KiB text file article (no ads, no useless pagination/SEO filler) which is a treasure trove of useful information, e.g. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/gba/921905-pokemon-emerald-version/faqs/22554 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/gba/921905-pokemon-emerald-ver... . Nowadays I'm almost happy if I find at least one sentence of useful information in an entire "article" recommended by Google. I think the above game example is an example of erosion of both sides: articles have gone to shit, and the amount of care, attention and depth to most games have gone down a lot.
- charlieyu1 5y agoDon’t know this game, but some of the best resources about Age of Empires 2 are written in .txt files.
- raldi 5y agoLike Genius, but for walkthroughs. And while you're at it, recipes.
- after_care 5y agoIn the recent past I’ve concluded that I consider being in the top results of Google Search to be an indicator of a poor quality website.
- jamesmishra 5y agoThis problem is unsolvable in the general case. Generative models will asymptotically approach the same statistical distribution of real data. Eventually, content farms will make actual websites... and nobody will know the difference.