3 ms·

> The spam SEO sites actually provide more value than random forum conversations. How so? The SEO sites are fundamentally dishonest because they are always try

• lopatin 4y ago
  Imagine a hypothetical scenario: Someone is buying office chairs and Google has two search results for it. The first is a forum thread with 3 posts on it. A couple people posted their arm chair opinions (no pun intended) and experiences with their chairs. No affiliate links included. The second is a full blown encyclopedia style repository of useful information about all kinds of office chairs. The content here is unmatched. And yes, it has affiliate links. Why is this necessary less valuable? I’ll stop here because the next step is debating what capitalism even means.
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    If no other information is known other than what you just wrote, I would assume that the second result is untrustworthy, because in the first result the authors have no financial incentive to deceive me and so I have to consider only that they might be mistaken or their subjective experience differs from mine, but in the second scenario it is a reasonable assumption that the whole content may be explicitly designed with an intent to mislead me - because we know for sure that at least for other types of products the vendors do put in the effort and marketing $$ to make such seemingly independent sites.