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Perhaps most disturbing of all, in just the past year, an industry trend appears to have kicked off in which a subset of SEO companies has begun to acquire the
by ilamont 3y ago
Perhaps most disturbing of all, in just the past year, an industry trend appears to have kicked off in which a subset of SEO companies has begun to acquire the domain names and historical digital content archives of defunct small-town American newspapers for the express purpose of turning them into highly profitable backlink farms.
Does anyone think that these backlink farms will have much value 2 or 3 years from now?
This is not just about the role of AI providing better search results or answers to typical queries. It's also the longstanding decline in relevance of Google search queries gummed up with ads and SEO-optimized junk.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoDoesn’t really matter. The people behind this aren’t interested in anything beyond quick dollars
- ryukoposting 3y agoMoney is money, and if the cost of making a million dollars is $250K and incinerating a town's entire historical record, apparently that's a fine price for some people. Throw this on the heap of systemic ethical transgressions of the advertising industry, along with list selling, poor targeting practices, ...
- short_sells_poo 3y agoIt's grotesque that this is not even the direct effect of the advertising industry, it is the side effect of Google's algo to sort results. Being ranked higher in the Goog results is sadly worth more than a town's historical records. I wonder if things were different if Google wasn't allowed to monopolize search.
- ryukoposting 3y agoWe face dozens of material problems that could be solved if the advertising industry had even a sprinkle of shame. Imagine the world we'd live in if list buying and backlink buying were taboo.
- p3rls 3y agoI thought Google's blogspam was going to be defeated roughly 2010 and invested my entire networth into a legitimate website to take out my niche. It didn't work-- blogspam destroyed my app in traffic 5:1. My main blogspam competitor literally still gets hacked every other day but after all this time is still #1 on google. He posts on twitter in broken English that he doesn't understand why ISPs are blocking him, but it doesn't matter. The backlinks he bought back when he started launched him sky high, he even got a few legit links now from NYT, LATimes etc, despite being the ugliest blogspam you've ever seen. I wouldn't expect Google to fix anything, these spammers already made their fortunes. Check out r/seo sometime and look at some of the accounts that post there. These people can't put together complete sentences but were dominating Google for a decade. This last March update was -finally- a step in the right direction.
- Hnrobert42 3y agoI sympathize with your plight, and I see blogspam as theft. > These people can’t put together complete sentences but were dominating Google for a decade. But it is a mistake to confuse poor English with lack of intelligence or ability.
- ImaCake 3y agoIndeed, if someone is succeeding despite the barriers of their ad-hoc, idiosyncratic, ESL then it might signal that they are really good at something. Note that the something could be appearing very successful in-spite of broken english.
- p3rls 3y agoI would never make the claim that English ability = intelligence, but you definitely shouldn't be dominating the search results for English-speaking audiences. No escriblo para papel de espanol porque my idoima esta basura!