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SEO is a dirty, low-down, snake-oil sales pitch. Back in the dark ages (happy days), SEO was actually a real thing. You would use the HTML meta description, k

by 10g1k 3y ago

SEO is a dirty, low-down, snake-oil sales pitch. Back in the dark ages (happy days), SEO was actually a real thing. You would use the HTML meta description, keywords, etc, to set up things which would actually be used by search engines to categorise and rank webpages. Then gooble came along and decided to rank search results based on: - The number of links back to something, which depended on popularity and longevity, NOT relevance or quality. - Who pays gooble the most. Primarily who pays gooble the most. Gooble completely did away with actual SEO. So now all these businesses promising to do SEO for other businesses are mostly just throwing links and blurbs on every social media platform (or Gooble Sheets etc), and maybe buying a page rank boost from gooble directly. Merely adding keywords in page content is not SEO. Not the old (real) way, and not the gooble way.

janalsncm 3y ago
I don’t think meta description or keywords would work anymore. Their problems were the original reason PageRank was developed in the first place. There will always be a very long tail of documents that match a query, so you need some outside information to rank their relevance and value. In fact, spammy keyword-stuffed articles are likely to be better matches since authentic content probably won’t be trying to game the ranking algorithm. Unfortunately now that Google so thoroughly dominates search, their perverse incentive to rank garbage ad-saturated listicles highly is not mediated by user behavior (to leave). This warning was also noted in the original PageRank paper.
OJFord 3y ago
You could just as easily tell it as meta description etc. incentivising keyword-stuffing, and PageRank/'gooble' coming along and more reliably determining quality by a form of peer review.
paulcole 3y ago
I think it’s “Google” not “Gooble.”

by 10g1k 3y ago

janalsncm 3y ago

I don’t think meta description or keywords would work anymore. Their problems were the original reason PageRank was developed in the first place. There will always be a very long tail of documents that match a query, so you need some outside information to rank their relevance and value. In fact, spammy keyword-stuffed articles are likely to be better matches since authentic content probably won’t be trying to game the ranking algorithm. Unfortunately now that Google so thoroughly dominates search, their perverse incentive to rank garbage ad-saturated listicles highly is not mediated by user behavior (to leave). This warning was also noted in the original PageRank paper.

OJFord 3y ago

You could just as easily tell it as meta description etc. incentivising keyword-stuffing, and PageRank/'gooble' coming along and more reliably determining quality by a form of peer review.

paulcole 3y ago

I think it’s “Google” not “Gooble.”