7 ms·

Ahrefs is the biggest reason why Google results are so bad nowadays. While they call it SEO, this site gives you the very metrics which every so called SEOer u

by thyrox 4y ago

Ahrefs is the biggest reason why Google results are so bad nowadays. While they call it SEO, this site gives you the very metrics which every so called SEOer uses to game Google search results (and it's very good tbh). I hope they are ready to face the seo monster they have created and yep can't be gamed as easily.

a13n 4y ago
It’s not exactly their fault for noticing a valuable problem and solving it though. Google is the reason the incentive exists in the first place, no?
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > It’s not exactly their fault for noticing a valuable problem and solving it though Why not? And they didn't solve the problem, they exploited the problem.
- judge2020 4y ago
  It seems the websites with the most poor-quality, ad-filled, possibly incorrect information are the ones trying to game the system the most. If you're someone who just has a blog or website and is focused on the content, this turns ahrefs into a 'cartel' you must pay into if you want your own SEO to be on the same par as those spending all their time on seo optimization.
  - glenngillen 4y ago
    I worked for a company in the SEO space a bit over a decade ago, initially to try and learn the things you call out above. My surprise at the time was to discover most of the snake oil being sold as “SEO” was nothing more than basic usability 101 stuff. Make sure titles are descriptive. Try to use terms that your readers would use and recognise to ensure the content resonates. Structure your content in a sensible way with clear headings. It’s almost like Google were trying to turn a human experience into an algorithm! ;) There was obviously a bunch of black hat stuff too but the efficacy of that was generally pretty short lived and the techniques tightly held. The whole SEO industry seemed to be in on the joke that you only spoke about those techniques or provided training on them after they stopped working. Something seems to have changed since that time though. I don’t think it’s Ahrefs because there were similar services long before them. Did Google lose their way and stop trying to quantify a human experience? I had my concerns back then when they introduced the concept of a canonical URL for duplicate content, something that’s implemented in a way to only be useful for a bot and not a person. But I’ve been too distant to these things to know if it was an isolated example or the beginning of a trend. Did the cat and mouse game of improving usability come to a plateau and now we’re in the inevitable end game of exploiting edge cases and 2% improvements? Is this what should have been the completely predictable state we’d end up given the alignment of incentives? Search results that are _just_ good enough so that you don’t abandon Google, but not so good that you click a result instead of an ad. I don’t know what the cause is, or if it’s even just one thing. But it definitely feels like it’s been getting progressively worse for a long time and that the rate of decline has been accelerating. To that end I’ve personally switched to Kagi. It’s at least ticked the “just good enough” box for me for a few months, which is something that never stuck with DDG. And so I fronted the cash for an annual subscription incase the incentive system with Google was part of the problem. I figure me moaning about it while still active using it means I’m complicit in being part of the problem too. And so I should vote with both my feet and dollars in support of any team that’s actually trying to fix things.
    - ratww 4y ago
      I also worked at a SEO company but not with a goal, although I also left there disgusted with the practice. The issue however (IMO) is that there's SEO at the article level and SEO at a strategic level. At the article level, it is indeed mostly harmless, except when they catch some Google bias such as removing dates and edit notices from blog posts (because evergreen articles supposedly rank better), force a certain word count, H1/H2 count and paragraph size (which is why you get a life story before a recipe), or when it teaches you to disguise keyword stuffing and you get articles with semi-nonsensical paragraphs that can rank high. This is mostly annoying, though. But IMO the biggest problem is SEO at a strategic level, which is what's done with the help of tools like Moz and Ahrefs. Websites often hire content agencies to make a large number of low-quality articles targeting popular searches that don't show too many results yet. Basically "balancing" demand/supply. But this practice puts non-SEO-optimized results at the bottom and replaces them with low-quality articles written by freelancers. This forces non-commercial publishers into bigger websites (like StackOverflow, Quora or Reddit). It also causes a lot of duplicate content, since those content agencies uses existing content from results as the basis for their own articles, only SEO optimized. The articles are of course rewritten so it's not word-by-word plagiarism. They also help evading Google measures to fix results. The latest trend when I was still in the industry was having unrelated companies helping each other do inorganic link-building by putting random links in more popular websites also controlled by those agencies, but that's probably old stuff by now.
      - systematical 4y ago
        It's been about a decade since I did anything serious with SEO. I knew it was sleezy garbage then, but did it for the money. I would outright lie to non-profits to get links from their sites to my seemingly legit site. After a few weeks I'd 301 it to my main site. I really feel bad about this. I did a lot of other underhanded shit to rank highly and it all worked. The biggest problem was feeling like a bad human and not wanting to tell my friends about how I made money on my side hustle. I am really glad I sold those sites and left SEO behind. My side hustle now is writing FOSS.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
Havoc 4y ago
>this site gives you the very metrics which every so called SEOer uses to game Google search results Seems a little harsh. People would be trying to game the search results with or without the metrics. They're just selling a shovel though. The ad industry and its money is the root cause behind the gold rush, not the shovel seller.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  No one is ever to blame for anything in economics. The ad industry isn’t a person or thing with any ethics bound to it. It’s just a creation of the market. You may as well try blaming the air for being responsible for tornados. The only solution is to try to build a new system that can’t be abused.
  - SgtBastard 4y ago
    I mean, a market exists for illicit drugs, underage sexual services and straight up slavery. I think there is something to be said of the ethics of participating in some markets.
- popcorncowboy 4y ago
- DarylZero 4y ago
  It's not much like a shovel, as it's fundamentally a means of deception. Deception only has legitimate purposes insofar as "the ends justify the means," and they never do in this instance.
icehawk 4y ago
As a network operator that runs a number of websites I'm honestly one step away from null routing all of their traffic. I'm constantly seeing their bots and as far as I know it's not helping anything.
- bpicolo 4y ago
  They represented something like 30% of traffic at a couple places I worked. Their bots are not well behaved
- dazc 4y ago
  What's stopping you, they crawl your site day and night and sell the data they have harvested at a vast profit. They don't even respect robots.txt.
  - botsbreeder 4y ago
    AhrefsBot respects robots.txt. Details are here: https://ahrefs.com/robot https://ahrefs.com/robot
    - blitzar 4y ago
      My parents say I am a very good boy too.
      - agmater 4y ago
        If you don't believe the CEO you can always just IP block them. In my experience they respect "User-agent: * Disallow: /".
    - dazc 4y ago
      Blocking the user agent in my WAF is the only thing that actually worked. So, I'm sure you're right and I am just a random outlying case.

by thyrox 4y ago

a13n 4y ago

It’s not exactly their fault for noticing a valuable problem and solving it though. Google is the reason the incentive exists in the first place, no?

HWR_14 4y ago
> It’s not exactly their fault for noticing a valuable problem and solving it though Why not? And they didn't solve the problem, they exploited the problem.
judge2020 4y ago
It seems the websites with the most poor-quality, ad-filled, possibly incorrect information are the ones trying to game the system the most. If you're someone who just has a blog or website and is focused on the content, this turns ahrefs into a 'cartel' you must pay into if you want your own SEO to be on the same par as those spending all their time on seo optimization.
- glenngillen 4y ago
  I worked for a company in the SEO space a bit over a decade ago, initially to try and learn the things you call out above. My surprise at the time was to discover most of the snake oil being sold as “SEO” was nothing more than basic usability 101 stuff. Make sure titles are descriptive. Try to use terms that your readers would use and recognise to ensure the content resonates. Structure your content in a sensible way with clear headings. It’s almost like Google were trying to turn a human experience into an algorithm! ;) There was obviously a bunch of black hat stuff too but the efficacy of that was generally pretty short lived and the techniques tightly held. The whole SEO industry seemed to be in on the joke that you only spoke about those techniques or provided training on them after they stopped working. Something seems to have changed since that time though. I don’t think it’s Ahrefs because there were similar services long before them. Did Google lose their way and stop trying to quantify a human experience? I had my concerns back then when they introduced the concept of a canonical URL for duplicate content, something that’s implemented in a way to only be useful for a bot and not a person. But I’ve been too distant to these things to know if it was an isolated example or the beginning of a trend. Did the cat and mouse game of improving usability come to a plateau and now we’re in the inevitable end game of exploiting edge cases and 2% improvements? Is this what should have been the completely predictable state we’d end up given the alignment of incentives? Search results that are _just_ good enough so that you don’t abandon Google, but not so good that you click a result instead of an ad. I don’t know what the cause is, or if it’s even just one thing. But it definitely feels like it’s been getting progressively worse for a long time and that the rate of decline has been accelerating. To that end I’ve personally switched to Kagi. It’s at least ticked the “just good enough” box for me for a few months, which is something that never stuck with DDG. And so I fronted the cash for an annual subscription incase the incentive system with Google was part of the problem. I figure me moaning about it while still active using it means I’m complicit in being part of the problem too. And so I should vote with both my feet and dollars in support of any team that’s actually trying to fix things.
  - ratww 4y ago
    I also worked at a SEO company but not with a goal, although I also left there disgusted with the practice. The issue however (IMO) is that there's SEO at the article level and SEO at a strategic level. At the article level, it is indeed mostly harmless, except when they catch some Google bias such as removing dates and edit notices from blog posts (because evergreen articles supposedly rank better), force a certain word count, H1/H2 count and paragraph size (which is why you get a life story before a recipe), or when it teaches you to disguise keyword stuffing and you get articles with semi-nonsensical paragraphs that can rank high. This is mostly annoying, though. But IMO the biggest problem is SEO at a strategic level, which is what's done with the help of tools like Moz and Ahrefs. Websites often hire content agencies to make a large number of low-quality articles targeting popular searches that don't show too many results yet. Basically "balancing" demand/supply. But this practice puts non-SEO-optimized results at the bottom and replaces them with low-quality articles written by freelancers. This forces non-commercial publishers into bigger websites (like StackOverflow, Quora or Reddit). It also causes a lot of duplicate content, since those content agencies uses existing content from results as the basis for their own articles, only SEO optimized. The articles are of course rewritten so it's not word-by-word plagiarism. They also help evading Google measures to fix results. The latest trend when I was still in the industry was having unrelated companies helping each other do inorganic link-building by putting random links in more popular websites also controlled by those agencies, but that's probably old stuff by now.
    - systematical 4y ago
      It's been about a decade since I did anything serious with SEO. I knew it was sleezy garbage then, but did it for the money. I would outright lie to non-profits to get links from their sites to my seemingly legit site. After a few weeks I'd 301 it to my main site. I really feel bad about this. I did a lot of other underhanded shit to rank highly and it all worked. The biggest problem was feeling like a bad human and not wanting to tell my friends about how I made money on my side hustle. I am really glad I sold those sites and left SEO behind. My side hustle now is writing FOSS.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

Havoc 4y ago

>this site gives you the very metrics which every so called SEOer uses to game Google search results Seems a little harsh. People would be trying to game the search results with or without the metrics. They're just selling a shovel though. The ad industry and its money is the root cause behind the gold rush, not the shovel seller.

Gigachad 4y ago
No one is ever to blame for anything in economics. The ad industry isn’t a person or thing with any ethics bound to it. It’s just a creation of the market. You may as well try blaming the air for being responsible for tornados. The only solution is to try to build a new system that can’t be abused.
- SgtBastard 4y ago
  I mean, a market exists for illicit drugs, underage sexual services and straight up slavery. I think there is something to be said of the ethics of participating in some markets.
popcorncowboy 4y ago
DarylZero 4y ago
It's not much like a shovel, as it's fundamentally a means of deception. Deception only has legitimate purposes insofar as "the ends justify the means," and they never do in this instance.

icehawk 4y ago

As a network operator that runs a number of websites I'm honestly one step away from null routing all of their traffic. I'm constantly seeing their bots and as far as I know it's not helping anything.

bpicolo 4y ago
They represented something like 30% of traffic at a couple places I worked. Their bots are not well behaved
dazc 4y ago
What's stopping you, they crawl your site day and night and sell the data they have harvested at a vast profit. They don't even respect robots.txt.
- botsbreeder 4y ago
  AhrefsBot respects robots.txt. Details are here: https://ahrefs.com/robot https://ahrefs.com/robot
  - blitzar 4y ago
    My parents say I am a very good boy too.
    - agmater 4y ago
      If you don't believe the CEO you can always just IP block them. In my experience they respect "User-agent: * Disallow: /".
  - dazc 4y ago
    Blocking the user agent in my WAF is the only thing that actually worked. So, I'm sure you're right and I am just a random outlying case.