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Since this seems to be most relevant to SEO practitioners I might as well ask a loaded question. Given how prevalent spam sites are in search results now and ho

Since this seems to be most relevant to SEO practitioners I might as well ask a loaded question. Given how prevalent spam sites are in search results now and how bad Google seems to be at filtering them out, what's the argument for how SEO is a good thing in aggregate?

makeitdouble 2y ago
> how SEO is a good thing Are you asking whether people want discoverability for their product/companies ? Or if they're willing to give up agency and leave it to a third party for-profit corporation to dictate what is surfaced in people's generic searches ?
- mdorazio 2y ago
  I'm asking if optimizing for clicks in search results rather than optimizing for quality of content and letting search engines attempt to determine what's worth surfacing was overall a good thing for users.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    That's a valid question, but there is no answer to what "optimizing for quality of content" means, and every entity involved has a different view of it. We'd have to decide what is quality and what is content first, and I'd expect the heat death of the universe before we ever come to a useful definition that even matches half people's own definitions.
burningChrome 2y ago
Depends on the context. I'm a long time dev/designer and part-time SEO person. Back in the day (early to mid aughts) as an SEO person you really had to work to get your site noticed. You have to develop inbound links, create really good content, set your site up well for Google to index, used other resources like blogs and social media (when it was still in the early stages) to boost your positioning. In short, it was a full time, month-to-month job. The sites I worked on it was a constant battle to get a decent ranking and to maintain it. But you are 100% right. Somewhere in the last 8-10 years, everything has gone from search engines really protecting who they put on the front page, to loading the page with tons of ads (half of the results above the fold are now all ads, followed by more ads below the 10th position) and making it insanely easy to manipulate Google and others to get your site on the front page. Great example: In 2019, I had a medical device company that was a startup. Out of the blue they called me because of my prior relationship with one of the founders parents and the site I built for her. They needed a site designed, built, optimized and 15 pages of content written in less than three months. I gave them some insane price and they didn't even balked and said if I got done sooner, they would send me a bonus. I grabbed a template somewhere online, revamped the home page and the internal content pages and then proceeded to copy/paste content from other well known and not so well known sites in their industry. I did everything you should never do from an SEO standpoint. I figured it was a long shot, but worth the payoff. I got their site released on time, but the majority of the content was copied from other sites. Very little of it was original. I figured it would get buried in the first month. Nope. #3 on the first page for various searches I targeted. It was outranking the sites I copied the content from, it was crazy. To this day, the site remains in the top three places on the first page of Google and other search engines for dozens of searches I targeted. It was outranking huge medical supply companies in the same industry - all as a startup. That experience in 2019 was a huge wakeup call for me. It was blatantly obvious how easy it was to manipulate Google and other search engines. As of today, I have no idea if SEO is really a worthwhile pursuit any more considering how easy it is to do this. If I can do it, then I just assume everybody else is already doing it. If not, then they're missing out.

makeitdouble 2y ago

> how SEO is a good thing Are you asking whether people want discoverability for their product/companies ? Or if they're willing to give up agency and leave it to a third party for-profit corporation to dictate what is surfaced in people's generic searches ?

mdorazio 2y ago
I'm asking if optimizing for clicks in search results rather than optimizing for quality of content and letting search engines attempt to determine what's worth surfacing was overall a good thing for users.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  That's a valid question, but there is no answer to what "optimizing for quality of content" means, and every entity involved has a different view of it. We'd have to decide what is quality and what is content first, and I'd expect the heat death of the universe before we ever come to a useful definition that even matches half people's own definitions.

burningChrome 2y ago

Depends on the context. I'm a long time dev/designer and part-time SEO person. Back in the day (early to mid aughts) as an SEO person you really had to work to get your site noticed. You have to develop inbound links, create really good content, set your site up well for Google to index, used other resources like blogs and social media (when it was still in the early stages) to boost your positioning. In short, it was a full time, month-to-month job. The sites I worked on it was a constant battle to get a decent ranking and to maintain it. But you are 100% right. Somewhere in the last 8-10 years, everything has gone from search engines really protecting who they put on the front page, to loading the page with tons of ads (half of the results above the fold are now all ads, followed by more ads below the 10th position) and making it insanely easy to manipulate Google and others to get your site on the front page. Great example: In 2019, I had a medical device company that was a startup. Out of the blue they called me because of my prior relationship with one of the founders parents and the site I built for her. They needed a site designed, built, optimized and 15 pages of content written in less than three months. I gave them some insane price and they didn't even balked and said if I got done sooner, they would send me a bonus. I grabbed a template somewhere online, revamped the home page and the internal content pages and then proceeded to copy/paste content from other well known and not so well known sites in their industry. I did everything you should never do from an SEO standpoint. I figured it was a long shot, but worth the payoff. I got their site released on time, but the majority of the content was copied from other sites. Very little of it was original. I figured it would get buried in the first month. Nope. #3 on the first page for various searches I targeted. It was outranking the sites I copied the content from, it was crazy. To this day, the site remains in the top three places on the first page of Google and other search engines for dozens of searches I targeted. It was outranking huge medical supply companies in the same industry - all as a startup. That experience in 2019 was a huge wakeup call for me. It was blatantly obvious how easy it was to manipulate Google and other search engines. As of today, I have no idea if SEO is really a worthwhile pursuit any more considering how easy it is to do this. If I can do it, then I just assume everybody else is already doing it. If not, then they're missing out.