6 ms·

The SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text

141 points by ilamont 3y ago

spaceman42 3y ago
Now that subreddits have gone private , its even more difficult to get good result. Adding "reddit" to the end of the query is of no help.
- Proven 3y ago
  [dead]
- petra 3y ago
  Is there a tool for moderatorsof private subreddits to scrape the sub's content and upload it elsewhere?
nubinetwork 3y ago
I've long believed that SEO is a scam... Also, wasn't google supposed to start punishing over-SEOed websites because of people google bombing "miserable failure"?
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  SEO works; you can verify it easily by searching for how to do any action on linux. Unless you include "stack", all the results will be SEO spam sites that copied their content from stackoverflow. Google does punish SEO, but it has failed in adressing the recent trend of blogspam. I think ultimately unless they're whitelisting sites (like SO) there is no way to algorithmically differentiate between blogspam and genuinely useful tech blogs, because the difference lies in natural language and not features of the page. Also, since these blogspam sites use very detailed language, they rank higher despite the language being just disguised keywords. Ultimately it is up to google to do better if they want to stay relevant. The recent influx of custom search providers is i think a sign that the giant is faltering. People are looking at smaller players and are deciding "google isn't that good to begin with, surely these guys can do better?".
  - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
    > I think ultimately unless they're whitelisting sites (like SO) there is no way to algorithmically differentiate between blogspam and genuinely useful tech blogs It has always been utterly mindblowing that apparently not a single person with power in the entire chain of command at Google has ever recognized that websites showing exact replicas of content from the very small list of extremely famous moderated content generators like Stack Overflow should just be blackholed. The number of legitimate Stack Overflows (the genre of legitimate content producers, not the specific domain) is very small. The list could be successfully curated manually by a troglodyte. Like, FFS, give google engineers a button they can click to mark a site as crap. They use the internet too and there are literally tens of thousands of them googling to find things on stack overflow all day every day. All they need is a "this site is an SEO scam" button. Not doing this speaks directly to either malice or incompetence (personally I think both), because it's not a super obscure problem that nobody inside google has ever encountered before.
- libertine 3y ago
  Why should Google punish the websites that go through the effort of applying their guidelines and best practices? I can give you an example, while doing technical SEO I coordinated a project to implement structured metadata to the pages (for example if the page had FAQs we would use the structured data for that). We went through that effort for Google to change their mind a few months ago. They decided to cut down on displaying featured snippets on search results, and with that we got a hit on our traffic. After following Google's own guidelines, and recommendations. Dealing with this crap isn't enough punishment?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Dealing with this crap isn't enough punishment? Nope, that's not even close to enough punishment.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    Google inevitably has to change their guidelines. Black-hat SEO attends every conference you did, and work it to their advantage. Google keeps trying to get ahead of them, but they always slip behind. Your problem isn't with Google. Your problem is with your black-hat compatriots. That sucks, because you probably can't fight them on your own. Google has to, and you are the inevitable casualty of that fight.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
auct 3y ago
It always feels wrong that websites with hard navigation and long useless texts that have high average time wasted (spent) will rank higher than human friendly one.
lurkerforawhile 3y ago
Google is culpable here. With it's seemingly infinite resources they have curated a fragile web, while failing to derank obvious spam and cloned content. To me, this seems more like inaction and misaligned incentives, which makes sense when you consider that the SEO and Adtech industries are bedfellows.
Sai_ 3y ago
Self inflicted and so, deserved. They could stayed neutral arbiters of content but they decided to incentivise websites to host ads, then let them fight to drive traffic to the site. They deserve whatever doo-doo is accruing to them. Theyre so clueless that they never seriously fought for social and now most useful (aka human generated) content is hidden behind login screens on Discord and Insta and the like. I’m calling it now - now that most content we want to engage with is behind login walls, Pagerank/Search is anachronism.
sourcecodeplz 3y ago
Haven't used Google Search much since ChatGPT launched. Couldn't care less about garbage text flooding the web.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "Couldn't care less about garbage text flooding the web." Isn't that what GPT is trained on, though? And future iterations as well?
  - gumby 3y ago
    Generators like GPT are also a big and increasing source of this garbage.
    - datavirtue 3y ago
      After GPT chokes on its own garbage...what next?
      - gumby 3y ago
        Apparently this happened with Google Translate: people were using it as a simple way to internationalize web sites* and the translation training started ingesting a large amount of its own exhaust. They had to stop automatically reading the web. * I know this isn't i18n, but the kind of people who would try this are clearly too stupid to care, or perhaps know.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Now it's all neatly summarized in a single paragraph!
CogitoCogito 3y ago
This reminds me of something Matt Levine said recently. It went something like "modern finance will find a way to make a risk-free asset risky". To me it's similar to the idea that reputation has value and hence destroying it to turn a profit can make economic sense. Hence corporate raiders destroying 100 year old brands in a couple years by extracting all good brand value. And then you have Google doing some sort of ranking where being at the top has worth. So then whatever algorithms there are get gamed which eventually leads to a loss in useful signal. Ignoring any critiques of mistakes or shortsightness of Google, it seems to me that this is in some sense inevitable. I saw a poster (here on Hacker News maybe?) make the point that the fact that anonymous reviews on e.g. Amazon are no longer trustworthy is the historical norm. The fact that we had ~20 years were we could maybe trust people without their reputation was the weird part not the fact that you no longer can trust them. I mean personally I find it all sad, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Our trust in anonymous people has value and hence exploiting it (and hence destroying that trust) makes sense. I think all of this is some human version of social entropy at work. Maybe it's a historical ebb and flow over time, but it seems like a natural result of our human nature.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > The fact that we had ~20 years were we could maybe trust people without their reputation was the weird part not the fact that you no longer can trust them. I disagree, they did have reputation. The fact the those anonymous people were online and posting reviews during that specific timeframe in that specific environment served as a filter. Once everyone was online, the filter no longer filtered, and so the reputation caused by the filter disappeared too.
  - CogitoCogito 3y ago
    I think that's a fair description of things. Taken things with your vocabulary, the reputation that existed was exploited for profit until the reputation was not more.
- mbg721 3y ago
  I think of the explotation of reputation as a form of arbitrage resulting from social norms loosening in the 1960s. It's another expression of the postmodern idea "Well, our institutions do untrustworthy things, so let's tear them all down!" At some point we realize we need institutions again.
letterlib 3y ago
I realize I'm inviting the ire of HN, but I'm an SEO and fully agree with the sentiment of the article. Namely a lot of content on the web is purely for Google. What some people miss is this isn't just SEOs gaming the system. This is a system that Google explicitly asks for. I've watched John Mueller's (a Google Search Rep) AMA sessions where he answers questions on SEO and he's advocated for webmasters to add text onto product listing pages to "help users" get a clearer understanding of the page. Nope. It's because even though Google has some of the best technology in the world, it's search algo is still pretty dumb. No person needs a few sentences of text on an ecommerce page about couches to understand the page is relevant to couches and sofas, but Google does because it only understands text. That's also the reason why any recipe you find on the internet is buried at the bottom of the page. The pointless adding of content to the internet is annoying as hell, but given that ChatGPT is able to create fairly cogent answers for a majority of queries it's, I'm frankly surprised Google isn't better. Lastly, this article really only references creating content for SEO which is not all of SEO. Many parts of SEO actually do make sense. For example, making sure your content is actually visible onsite, redirecting old urls to new urls, making sure to internally link to pages people actually care about, etc... These should be website best practices but a ton of websites don't do them. Good SEO is hard. Creating changes that are good for Google + users takes a lot of thought, effort, and testing. Bad SEO (i.e generating a bunch of pages/useless content for Google) is very easy and you don't need to know anything about actual SEO to do it. For some reason anyone able to look up a keywords search volume and write a post is an SEO.
- account42 3y ago
  I think the downfall of Google (the search engine) started when Google decided to host/participate in SEO conferences instead of keeping the relationship more distant (focusing on showing users the sites they want rather than helping people get users).
- etempleton 3y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. I have dabbled in SEO and it feels like the cost of doing business. Google also seems to have it wrong these days. Unless I am searching for a specific website name Google search has been useless for me. General questions are often poorly met with results. I don’t find DuckDuckGo all that better. The value of ChatGPT as implemented in Bing is it gives you the answer directly and then sites sources.
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
As an SEO I don't see how Google is going to be able to fix this. I'm in the beta of the new SGE (Search Generative Experience) and it gives great generative information, but will be FORCED to show the sources front and center unless they want their ad revenue to collapse. Given this, a new race to the top will commence by SEOs to try and get on that "3 pack" snippet of information.
_fat_santa 3y ago
I see so much gaming of SEO. One of my pet peeves when searching for some long tail technical topic: "[Sequelize] some long error message" for example. What I often see is Github issues on the SERP but above that you have some random blog that just scrapes from Github issues and adds an extra sprinkle of SEO to get to the top.
choas 3y ago
[flagged]
xingped 3y ago
What is the alternative? How do you possibly have some sort of searching and ranking system that cannot in some way be gamed like this? Actually serious, not rhetorical. I'm curious if there is some way to prevent this mess or if it is an inevitable end-state.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  As long as the web is chained to the ad world, there is no alternative. The end-state is obvious and inevitable. Advertising will ruin the web, just as it has ruined just about everything else that has cozied too much to it.
machdiamonds 3y ago
Ironically, LLMs could be a game-changer in dealing with SEO noise, not at the search stage, but during the indexing of web pages. By understanding context and semantics, they could help create a more refined and relevant index, effectively cutting through the clutter of SEO-optimized content.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  One word: LLM-optimized
  - weregiraffe 3y ago
    That's two words.
    - _aavaa_ 3y ago
      Hyphenated compound words are treated as one word. The same is true for closed compound words (e.g. chairman is one word even though it's made by combining "chair" and "man").

141 points by ilamont 3y ago

Now that subreddits have gone private , its even more difficult to get good result. Adding "reddit" to the end of the query is of no help.

Proven 3y ago
[dead]
petra 3y ago
Is there a tool for moderatorsof private subreddits to scrape the sub's content and upload it elsewhere?

nubinetwork 3y ago

I've long believed that SEO is a scam... Also, wasn't google supposed to start punishing over-SEOed websites because of people google bombing "miserable failure"?

themoonisachees 3y ago
SEO works; you can verify it easily by searching for how to do any action on linux. Unless you include "stack", all the results will be SEO spam sites that copied their content from stackoverflow. Google does punish SEO, but it has failed in adressing the recent trend of blogspam. I think ultimately unless they're whitelisting sites (like SO) there is no way to algorithmically differentiate between blogspam and genuinely useful tech blogs, because the difference lies in natural language and not features of the page. Also, since these blogspam sites use very detailed language, they rank higher despite the language being just disguised keywords. Ultimately it is up to google to do better if they want to stay relevant. The recent influx of custom search providers is i think a sign that the giant is faltering. People are looking at smaller players and are deciding "google isn't that good to begin with, surely these guys can do better?".
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
  > I think ultimately unless they're whitelisting sites (like SO) there is no way to algorithmically differentiate between blogspam and genuinely useful tech blogs It has always been utterly mindblowing that apparently not a single person with power in the entire chain of command at Google has ever recognized that websites showing exact replicas of content from the very small list of extremely famous moderated content generators like Stack Overflow should just be blackholed. The number of legitimate Stack Overflows (the genre of legitimate content producers, not the specific domain) is very small. The list could be successfully curated manually by a troglodyte. Like, FFS, give google engineers a button they can click to mark a site as crap. They use the internet too and there are literally tens of thousands of them googling to find things on stack overflow all day every day. All they need is a "this site is an SEO scam" button. Not doing this speaks directly to either malice or incompetence (personally I think both), because it's not a super obscure problem that nobody inside google has ever encountered before.
libertine 3y ago
Why should Google punish the websites that go through the effort of applying their guidelines and best practices? I can give you an example, while doing technical SEO I coordinated a project to implement structured metadata to the pages (for example if the page had FAQs we would use the structured data for that). We went through that effort for Google to change their mind a few months ago. They decided to cut down on displaying featured snippets on search results, and with that we got a hit on our traffic. After following Google's own guidelines, and recommendations. Dealing with this crap isn't enough punishment?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Dealing with this crap isn't enough punishment? Nope, that's not even close to enough punishment.
- jfengel 3y ago
  Google inevitably has to change their guidelines. Black-hat SEO attends every conference you did, and work it to their advantage. Google keeps trying to get ahead of them, but they always slip behind. Your problem isn't with Google. Your problem is with your black-hat compatriots. That sucks, because you probably can't fight them on your own. Google has to, and you are the inevitable casualty of that fight.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

auct 3y ago

It always feels wrong that websites with hard navigation and long useless texts that have high average time wasted (spent) will rank higher than human friendly one.

lurkerforawhile 3y ago

Google is culpable here. With it's seemingly infinite resources they have curated a fragile web, while failing to derank obvious spam and cloned content. To me, this seems more like inaction and misaligned incentives, which makes sense when you consider that the SEO and Adtech industries are bedfellows.

Sai_ 3y ago

Self inflicted and so, deserved. They could stayed neutral arbiters of content but they decided to incentivise websites to host ads, then let them fight to drive traffic to the site. They deserve whatever doo-doo is accruing to them. Theyre so clueless that they never seriously fought for social and now most useful (aka human generated) content is hidden behind login screens on Discord and Insta and the like. I’m calling it now - now that most content we want to engage with is behind login walls, Pagerank/Search is anachronism.

sourcecodeplz 3y ago

Haven't used Google Search much since ChatGPT launched. Couldn't care less about garbage text flooding the web.

JimtheCoder 3y ago
"Couldn't care less about garbage text flooding the web." Isn't that what GPT is trained on, though? And future iterations as well?
- gumby 3y ago
  Generators like GPT are also a big and increasing source of this garbage.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    After GPT chokes on its own garbage...what next?
    - gumby 3y ago
      Apparently this happened with Google Translate: people were using it as a simple way to internationalize web sites* and the translation training started ingesting a large amount of its own exhaust. They had to stop automatically reading the web. * I know this isn't i18n, but the kind of people who would try this are clearly too stupid to care, or perhaps know.
rchaud 3y ago
Now it's all neatly summarized in a single paragraph!

CogitoCogito 3y ago

This reminds me of something Matt Levine said recently. It went something like "modern finance will find a way to make a risk-free asset risky". To me it's similar to the idea that reputation has value and hence destroying it to turn a profit can make economic sense. Hence corporate raiders destroying 100 year old brands in a couple years by extracting all good brand value. And then you have Google doing some sort of ranking where being at the top has worth. So then whatever algorithms there are get gamed which eventually leads to a loss in useful signal. Ignoring any critiques of mistakes or shortsightness of Google, it seems to me that this is in some sense inevitable. I saw a poster (here on Hacker News maybe?) make the point that the fact that anonymous reviews on e.g. Amazon are no longer trustworthy is the historical norm. The fact that we had ~20 years were we could maybe trust people without their reputation was the weird part not the fact that you no longer can trust them. I mean personally I find it all sad, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Our trust in anonymous people has value and hence exploiting it (and hence destroying that trust) makes sense. I think all of this is some human version of social entropy at work. Maybe it's a historical ebb and flow over time, but it seems like a natural result of our human nature.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
> The fact that we had ~20 years were we could maybe trust people without their reputation was the weird part not the fact that you no longer can trust them. I disagree, they did have reputation. The fact the those anonymous people were online and posting reviews during that specific timeframe in that specific environment served as a filter. Once everyone was online, the filter no longer filtered, and so the reputation caused by the filter disappeared too.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  I think that's a fair description of things. Taken things with your vocabulary, the reputation that existed was exploited for profit until the reputation was not more.
mbg721 3y ago
I think of the explotation of reputation as a form of arbitrage resulting from social norms loosening in the 1960s. It's another expression of the postmodern idea "Well, our institutions do untrustworthy things, so let's tear them all down!" At some point we realize we need institutions again.

letterlib 3y ago

I realize I'm inviting the ire of HN, but I'm an SEO and fully agree with the sentiment of the article. Namely a lot of content on the web is purely for Google. What some people miss is this isn't just SEOs gaming the system. This is a system that Google explicitly asks for. I've watched John Mueller's (a Google Search Rep) AMA sessions where he answers questions on SEO and he's advocated for webmasters to add text onto product listing pages to "help users" get a clearer understanding of the page. Nope. It's because even though Google has some of the best technology in the world, it's search algo is still pretty dumb. No person needs a few sentences of text on an ecommerce page about couches to understand the page is relevant to couches and sofas, but Google does because it only understands text. That's also the reason why any recipe you find on the internet is buried at the bottom of the page. The pointless adding of content to the internet is annoying as hell, but given that ChatGPT is able to create fairly cogent answers for a majority of queries it's, I'm frankly surprised Google isn't better. Lastly, this article really only references creating content for SEO which is not all of SEO. Many parts of SEO actually do make sense. For example, making sure your content is actually visible onsite, redirecting old urls to new urls, making sure to internally link to pages people actually care about, etc... These should be website best practices but a ton of websites don't do them. Good SEO is hard. Creating changes that are good for Google + users takes a lot of thought, effort, and testing. Bad SEO (i.e generating a bunch of pages/useless content for Google) is very easy and you don't need to know anything about actual SEO to do it. For some reason anyone able to look up a keywords search volume and write a post is an SEO.

account42 3y ago
I think the downfall of Google (the search engine) started when Google decided to host/participate in SEO conferences instead of keeping the relationship more distant (focusing on showing users the sites they want rather than helping people get users).
etempleton 3y ago
Couldn’t agree more. I have dabbled in SEO and it feels like the cost of doing business. Google also seems to have it wrong these days. Unless I am searching for a specific website name Google search has been useless for me. General questions are often poorly met with results. I don’t find DuckDuckGo all that better. The value of ChatGPT as implemented in Bing is it gives you the answer directly and then sites sources.

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

As an SEO I don't see how Google is going to be able to fix this. I'm in the beta of the new SGE (Search Generative Experience) and it gives great generative information, but will be FORCED to show the sources front and center unless they want their ad revenue to collapse. Given this, a new race to the top will commence by SEOs to try and get on that "3 pack" snippet of information.

_fat_santa 3y ago

I see so much gaming of SEO. One of my pet peeves when searching for some long tail technical topic: "[Sequelize] some long error message" for example. What I often see is Github issues on the SERP but above that you have some random blog that just scrapes from Github issues and adds an extra sprinkle of SEO to get to the top.

choas 3y ago

[flagged]

xingped 3y ago

What is the alternative? How do you possibly have some sort of searching and ranking system that cannot in some way be gamed like this? Actually serious, not rhetorical. I'm curious if there is some way to prevent this mess or if it is an inevitable end-state.

JohnFen 3y ago
As long as the web is chained to the ad world, there is no alternative. The end-state is obvious and inevitable. Advertising will ruin the web, just as it has ruined just about everything else that has cozied too much to it.

machdiamonds 3y ago

Ironically, LLMs could be a game-changer in dealing with SEO noise, not at the search stage, but during the indexing of web pages. By understanding context and semantics, they could help create a more refined and relevant index, effectively cutting through the clutter of SEO-optimized content.

_aavaa_ 3y ago
One word: LLM-optimized
- weregiraffe 3y ago
  That's two words.
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    Hyphenated compound words are treated as one word. The same is true for closed compound words (e.g. chairman is one word even though it's made by combining "chair" and "man").