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I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being compa

by donatj 3y ago

I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Moreover people within Google like Matt Cutts seemed to be at the time if not outright encouraging it, at the very least giving pointers on how to game the system. This strikes me as more relevant than ever, and I have to imagine the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically. Beyond that, the way Google now ranks pages based on how well they fit their pretty limited definition of working on mobile and how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites.

ryanjshaw 3y ago
> the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically. Do you mean LLMs will be used to generate more SEO content that is irrelevant? Doesn't it work both ways? You can use LLMs to filter out irrelevant content better than ever? A lot of the time I use ChatGPT-4 it's as a search engine - and I don't even mean with the Browser plugin, I mean it's quicker to ask ChatGPT-4 for its encoded knowledge than to Google and click on links.
- MourYother 3y ago
  GPT4 is trained on mostly garbage optimised for SEO though.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    If general AI, let's call it Heavenweb or Netsky, comes along and it is based on the knowledge of the internet I am not that worried so. GPT4 is trained on SEO crap, parts of it have been propably already written using GPT3. So by the time Skynet comes along, it will assume the bot-to-bot SEO crap content to be actually true, SEO contebt written by AI for AI trained on AI created SEO content. Eith that, Skynet would never be able to achieve anything, no decent scrambled egg let alone a T-100.
  - ryanjshaw 3y ago
    Maybe, but there is plenty of non-garbage information encoded so I don't understand the argument. I only ask it questions whose answers I can verify e.g. if I ask it how to do something in F#, a language I'm not very familiar with, I can easily confirm whefher the code does what I need it to or not. You can pump as much SEO garbage out as you want, it doesn't change the value of LLMs to me in this context.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      Clean datasets are critical in machine learning. Its kind of a miracle that LLMs work as well as they do now, but every drop of garbage (like SEO garbage) makes them worse and less efficient.
      - MereInterest 3y ago
        For example, early versions of GPT would effectively treat the string “SolidGoldMagikarp” as a random word. It was the username of a prolific poster on the /r/counting subreddit, which consists entirely of posters counting upward. This subreddit was excluded from the training data for being useless, but was still used in making the tokenizer. As a result, the string “SolidGoldMagikarp” was a single token with no training data about it. This was later fixed by updating the tokenizer, but it demonstrates the importance of clean datasets at all stages.
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
SEO / billboards / paid-for advertising is basically legal propaganda (arguably a form of mind control or more neutral we can say reality shaping through narrative structuring). I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting, anywhere else is "public domain" and shouldn't be allowed in my opinion. It is the root to many evils, it is the mechanism that trends towards hacking the user in the loop in a positive feedback system, which also optimizes at the users expense yet depends on the user. Quite parastic.
- majewsky 3y ago
  > I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting That's the horrifying beauty of it. Everything has been turned into a marketplace.
  - bflesch 3y ago
    Everything is a marketplace. In all situations, the human being follows incentices.
    - majewsky 3y ago
      The first does not follow from the second. Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition. If all human behavior was framed as a competition, we would not have been able to construct communities.
      - SideQuark 3y ago
        >Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition Humans spent far longer in kill others mode than in don't kill others mode. Incentives to not kill others is fairly new in history.
        chmod775 3y ago
seanwilson 3y ago
> I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked? If so, why isn't this done? You would have thought the original PageRank was meant to combat this because useless articles wouldn't get linked to. For what it's worth, whenever I'm helping with SEO, it's generally only to encourage website owners to use semantic HTML tags properly and structure their content in a way (e.g. titles, headings, sections, new pages with links between them) that's easier for humans with and without screen readers, and for search bots to read. I don't like the practice of writing articles to target profitable keywords that aren't relevant to your site or writing bloated articles. Unfortunately, all of this in lumped together as "SEO" so it's become a bad word. > how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites. I think speed is only a small ranking boost. Maybe this will increase over time. If it was a big boost right now, it would have forced every website to make large immediate changes which would have been very controversial I'd think.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Chyzwar 3y ago
  Google use page rank to figure out popularity of page, semantic analysis of content and manual overwrite of rank. If you are travel agency you create crap content and you create links to said pages. You target specific keywords and since your overall page authority is high then your shitty reasult flood google. If you have price comparision website you get manually de-ranked because you compete with google shopping. If you have stackoverflow clone you rank very high because google can serve more ads on your page vs stackoverflow. Even if google do recognize that content was scraped from SO, they choose to make money. On some keywords olny way to rank in results is to directly pay to google. For some keywords whole page of results is payed advertisments. Just to highlight few mechanisms.
- 3y ago
hef19898 3y ago
It would be ironic, if Google search, SEO and LLMs would make the internet so unusable as to give redacted content in the form of books and physical journals a second life. Well, my white list of sites providing good content for my interests actually is incredibly short by now anyway, in total maybe a handfull.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > Books Greedy publishers, Amazon and LLMs are already killing that hope.
mrtksn 3y ago
> I have to imagine the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically. Funny enough, LLMs are actually for the very first time challenging Google’s utility as a knowledge engine. I see more and more Non-techie people asking ChatGPT about receptors or locations instead of Google. Also, if there’s anything that I need to research and it’s not a general knowledge stuff but something like “How long I can travel with a EU registered car in Turkey” I will use Bing Chat, Perplexity or ChatGPT. I gave up Google already, it’s just too much spam and low quality content that I have enough incentive to break my usual workflow and habits and try LLMs. I’m sure Google is doing great monetarily with search as if everything is garbage Ads are quality content but the technology to bypass both the ads and garbage is here.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  Will it last though. How soon until LLMs get gamed as well - probably directly, e.g. looking for a product that can do X, SEOs battle it out to make sure a specific product gets suggested by the LLM. There are many problems with LLMs as knowledge engines, - as mentioned they can be gamed just like Google - they hallucinate, adding another possible source of errors to the results - they kill off the websites they scrap training data from making it unsustainable long term
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    I guess we can enjoy it as it lasts. Maybe if the LLM business model sticks with the paid subscription, then LLMs being on the user's side would try hard to provide high quality output. I don't think that Google has any incentive to do so, the shittier the organic content the more relevant the paid content as long as the users keep coming. As for the content providers, maybe they can once again do it without expectations of direct compensation. Maybe a content about Kazakhstan could be created by people who feel patriotic about the country and write about it because they would like foreigners know about their country. The degradation of quality can be attributed to Google but it's not only Google's part. The content went to the gutter when professionals entered the space and optimised for the business model that puts eyeballs above anything. Lack of such a revenue might actually be therapeutic.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Do you have a link? Twelve years ago, this wasn't even a thought in the back of my head, and I bet those in the SEO industry never thought Google would let things deteriorate to such an extreme.
- layer8 3y ago
  That discussion was well underway in 2011. Here’s two random finds (I guess Google search isn’t completely useless yet…): https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-new-and-better-google-2/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-... https://www.anildash.com/2011/01/03/threes_a_trend_the_decline_of_google_search_quality/ https://www.anildash.com/2011/01/03/threes_a_trend_the_decli...
- donatj 3y ago
  I do but it's not worth reading. It's rambling and unfocused. I made my point here far more clearly than there.

by donatj 3y ago

ryanjshaw 3y ago

> the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically. Do you mean LLMs will be used to generate more SEO content that is irrelevant? Doesn't it work both ways? You can use LLMs to filter out irrelevant content better than ever? A lot of the time I use ChatGPT-4 it's as a search engine - and I don't even mean with the Browser plugin, I mean it's quicker to ask ChatGPT-4 for its encoded knowledge than to Google and click on links.

MourYother 3y ago
GPT4 is trained on mostly garbage optimised for SEO though.
- hef19898 3y ago
  If general AI, let's call it Heavenweb or Netsky, comes along and it is based on the knowledge of the internet I am not that worried so. GPT4 is trained on SEO crap, parts of it have been propably already written using GPT3. So by the time Skynet comes along, it will assume the bot-to-bot SEO crap content to be actually true, SEO contebt written by AI for AI trained on AI created SEO content. Eith that, Skynet would never be able to achieve anything, no decent scrambled egg let alone a T-100.
- ryanjshaw 3y ago
  Maybe, but there is plenty of non-garbage information encoded so I don't understand the argument. I only ask it questions whose answers I can verify e.g. if I ask it how to do something in F#, a language I'm not very familiar with, I can easily confirm whefher the code does what I need it to or not. You can pump as much SEO garbage out as you want, it doesn't change the value of LLMs to me in this context.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Clean datasets are critical in machine learning. Its kind of a miracle that LLMs work as well as they do now, but every drop of garbage (like SEO garbage) makes them worse and less efficient.
    - MereInterest 3y ago
      For example, early versions of GPT would effectively treat the string “SolidGoldMagikarp” as a random word. It was the username of a prolific poster on the /r/counting subreddit, which consists entirely of posters counting upward. This subreddit was excluded from the training data for being useless, but was still used in making the tokenizer. As a result, the string “SolidGoldMagikarp” was a single token with no training data about it. This was later fixed by updating the tokenizer, but it demonstrates the importance of clean datasets at all stages.

pyinstallwoes 3y ago

SEO / billboards / paid-for advertising is basically legal propaganda (arguably a form of mind control or more neutral we can say reality shaping through narrative structuring). I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting, anywhere else is "public domain" and shouldn't be allowed in my opinion. It is the root to many evils, it is the mechanism that trends towards hacking the user in the loop in a positive feedback system, which also optimizes at the users expense yet depends on the user. Quite parastic.

majewsky 3y ago
> I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting That's the horrifying beauty of it. Everything has been turned into a marketplace.
- bflesch 3y ago
  Everything is a marketplace. In all situations, the human being follows incentices.
  - majewsky 3y ago
    The first does not follow from the second. Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition. If all human behavior was framed as a competition, we would not have been able to construct communities.
    - SideQuark 3y ago
      >Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition Humans spent far longer in kill others mode than in don't kill others mode. Incentives to not kill others is fairly new in history.
      - chmod775 3y ago

seanwilson 3y ago

> I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked? If so, why isn't this done? You would have thought the original PageRank was meant to combat this because useless articles wouldn't get linked to. For what it's worth, whenever I'm helping with SEO, it's generally only to encourage website owners to use semantic HTML tags properly and structure their content in a way (e.g. titles, headings, sections, new pages with links between them) that's easier for humans with and without screen readers, and for search bots to read. I don't like the practice of writing articles to target profitable keywords that aren't relevant to your site or writing bloated articles. Unfortunately, all of this in lumped together as "SEO" so it's become a bad word. > how “fast they load” has done exactly zero to promote quality content. I use quotes because I have worked on ad-ridden super slow SPA’s that manage higher scores than super fast static sites. I think speed is only a small ranking boost. Maybe this will increase over time. If it was a big boost right now, it would have forced every website to make large immediate changes which would have been very controversial I'd think.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Chyzwar 3y ago
Google use page rank to figure out popularity of page, semantic analysis of content and manual overwrite of rank. If you are travel agency you create crap content and you create links to said pages. You target specific keywords and since your overall page authority is high then your shitty reasult flood google. If you have price comparision website you get manually de-ranked because you compete with google shopping. If you have stackoverflow clone you rank very high because google can serve more ads on your page vs stackoverflow. Even if google do recognize that content was scraped from SO, they choose to make money. On some keywords olny way to rank in results is to directly pay to google. For some keywords whole page of results is payed advertisments. Just to highlight few mechanisms.
3y ago

hef19898 3y ago

It would be ironic, if Google search, SEO and LLMs would make the internet so unusable as to give redacted content in the form of books and physical journals a second life. Well, my white list of sites providing good content for my interests actually is incredibly short by now anyway, in total maybe a handfull.

brucethemoose2 3y ago
> Books Greedy publishers, Amazon and LLMs are already killing that hope.

mrtksn 3y ago

> I have to imagine the growth of large language models is only going to amplify this practice dramatically. Funny enough, LLMs are actually for the very first time challenging Google’s utility as a knowledge engine. I see more and more Non-techie people asking ChatGPT about receptors or locations instead of Google. Also, if there’s anything that I need to research and it’s not a general knowledge stuff but something like “How long I can travel with a EU registered car in Turkey” I will use Bing Chat, Perplexity or ChatGPT. I gave up Google already, it’s just too much spam and low quality content that I have enough incentive to break my usual workflow and habits and try LLMs. I’m sure Google is doing great monetarily with search as if everything is garbage Ads are quality content but the technology to bypass both the ads and garbage is here.

TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
Will it last though. How soon until LLMs get gamed as well - probably directly, e.g. looking for a product that can do X, SEOs battle it out to make sure a specific product gets suggested by the LLM. There are many problems with LLMs as knowledge engines, - as mentioned they can be gamed just like Google - they hallucinate, adding another possible source of errors to the results - they kill off the websites they scrap training data from making it unsustainable long term
- mrtksn 3y ago
  I guess we can enjoy it as it lasts. Maybe if the LLM business model sticks with the paid subscription, then LLMs being on the user's side would try hard to provide high quality output. I don't think that Google has any incentive to do so, the shittier the organic content the more relevant the paid content as long as the users keep coming. As for the content providers, maybe they can once again do it without expectations of direct compensation. Maybe a content about Kazakhstan could be created by people who feel patriotic about the country and write about it because they would like foreigners know about their country. The degradation of quality can be attributed to Google but it's not only Google's part. The content went to the gutter when professionals entered the space and optimised for the business model that puts eyeballs above anything. Lack of such a revenue might actually be therapeutic.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Do you have a link? Twelve years ago, this wasn't even a thought in the back of my head, and I bet those in the SEO industry never thought Google would let things deteriorate to such an extreme.

layer8 3y ago
That discussion was well underway in 2011. Here’s two random finds (I guess Google search isn’t completely useless yet…): https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-new-and-better-google-2/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-... https://www.anildash.com/2011/01/03/threes_a_trend_the_decline_of_google_search_quality/ https://www.anildash.com/2011/01/03/threes_a_trend_the_decli...
donatj 3y ago
I do but it's not worth reading. It's rambling and unfocused. I made my point here far more clearly than there.