You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT if you want to be shown on the main page for that category, you need to pay crazy PPC.<p>Source: I play this game since I run a software business. Would love an alternative but there are none. You either Play the game or you Die.
It's so weird that Google still hasn't created the ability to block spam domains.<p>I don't think it's a technical difficulty but rather a management decision to allow spam as long as they have their adsense ads and it baffles me they just don't care about their end users at all.<p>I think being a monopoly with most competitors lagging a lap behind can make you this way, but with chatgpt catching up quick, Google better start thinking about their users now as it's a growing sentiment that their quality is totally bad nowadays and their uncaring attitude towards spam domains like Pinterest and spam search results where sites are creating hundreds of pages with same content and different heading is just not gonna cut it anymore.
After having used computers for a few years (oh, about 30), and having grown up with the internet (first dialup at age 16 in 1996), I gotta say,<p>Access to information should not have (ranked, optimizable, commercially-bent) search as its base interface. This is a cosmic, civilization-level screwup. Not only do you get the decades of SEO and advertising, but the whole system becomes lossy over time. You can't find what you used to anymore.
The majority of times when i search on google I'm looking for someone's personal take on a matter. Whether it's a software recommendation or alternative, a recipe, or experience with a tool. Google only has listicles, top x, or best in 202x.<p>I used to search reddit, but the hostile mobile page ruined that for me. Now i go to yandex and navigate through malware to find what i want.<p>It doesn't help that recent trend of developers building their content website with react and such, have no little to no concept of SEO.
<i>It wasn't written to answer someone's question or satisfy their search intent. It was just written to rank.</i><p>Anyone who’s searched for reviews or tech questions recently has experienced this. And it’s slowly eating everything.<p>The web is turning into nothing but potemkin content.
The root cause of all this madness:<p>Ads.<p>As long as there is even a <i>marginal</i> financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse.<p>A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there is incentive to clone it.<p>I dont really know a good solution either. Targeted ads are incredibly useful to small businesses, and that genie is out of the bottle.
"Automated search engines that rely on keyword matching usually return too many low quality matches.
To make matters worse, some advertisers attempt to gain people’s attention by taking measures meant to
mislead automated search engines. We have built a large-scale search engine which addresses many of
the problems of existing systems. It makes especially heavy use of the additional structure present in
hypertext to provide much higher quality search results. We chose our system name, Google, because it
is a common spelling of googol"
OP will soon be ranking for the exact phrase he discusses.<p>(If we discuss “a comprehensive ecosystem of open-source software for big data management” enough, perhaps we can get this thread to rank too.)
> <i>this one of the 300 niche sites im building</i><p>Like bragging about throwing the most empty soda cans out of your car as you drive down the highway.
The whole Cisco courses, blog spam, SEO industry are some of the worst things to exist in technology. I hope all of them gets burned by a massive fire. Who even thinks of becoming a SEO consultant?
<i>"SEO is also a zero-sum game."</i><p>One with external costs imposed upon others.<p>I had a go at fixing this with Sitetruth, which was an attempt to tie web sites to real-world companies rated using info from Hoovers, the SEC, DNB, etc.
But the whole concept of tying web sites to real world companies now seems dated.
If you do a lot of SEO keyword research, you'll come across these often. Lots of topics have odd exam-question-like keywords with large search volumes. As the article points out, there's little point optimizing for them unless you want to attract traffic from students (or dishonestly bamboozle your SEO clients into thinking you've done wonders for their organic traffic).
Google being garbage as a search engine feels like something we could have predicted as soon as google realised ads make money.<p>Search engines powered by ads are simply not incentivised to send you to the best product, or even a group of the best products, since you won't click their adverts.
Is there a fundamental reason that content that ranks high can’t also answer a user query crisply?<p>Is it just that no one has found a good way to do it yet or is it fundamentally impossible because of some google ranking thing?
This isn't a glitch.<p>This is literally intentful design by Google to make as much revenue as possible while providing as little utility as possible.<p>The internet as we know it is utterly shaped by this purposeful dystopian SEO dynamic.
What perplexes me is how these sites make it to the _front page._ Isn't ranking heavily informed by the number of sites that link to the page in question, and the reputation of those sites? I would imagine that the only sites linking to these spam pages are other spam sites run by the same owner (and, of course, google.com), which themselves should have low reputations. Does "exact match" really outweigh reputation scores that much?
How do these SEO dashboards know what people are searching for? Is there a way (maybe via the ad bidding platform?) to get this kind of data from Google?
People talk about SEO as a cat&mouse game, but I'm not sure it has to be.<p>Does Google want to win the game, or do they profit from the game continuing?<p>For example... When Google was founded, your site would flourish by the value of its content. But today, given all the SEO that the search engines permit, your options are limited. And one of the big options you're forced to choose from is to pay Google money, to be seen at all in real-world searches by people.<p>"That's a very nice Web site you got. Would be a shame if nobody was to find it."<p>If they wanted to, maybe Google has enough information about the world that it could wipe out the vast majority of SEO, with a zero-tolerance policy.<p>For example... Let's say you do SEO work. Google can probably tell that a site you worked on was SEO'd. So the site gets penalized severely. But there's more. Google probably knows exactly who you are, much of what you work on, who you interact with, etc. After your last clients are burnt to the ground, discoverability-wise, you get an engagement to work on a different site. Google has a good chance of figuring out that, too, and those sites get penalized severely. For engaging in deceptive and manipulative behavior, to rig search engine results, compromising people's ability to access the world's information.<p>"Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."<p>You're not going to keep doing SEO, because nobody wants to pay money to have their site receive search engine perma-death.<p>I'm not saying that this particular approach would be a good thing (and there would have to be a managed transition from the current mass sociopathic frenzy). But saying that the current situation is a cat&mouse game that can't be solved... might mainly be serving the cat and the mouse.<p>Maybe the cat and mouse are in a symbiotic relationship that lets them both milk the cows.
well, a comprehensive ecosystem of open source software for big data management definitely describes Hadoop, so this article is ranked #1 for showing us that.
Given “a strange game: Almost as strange as global thermonuclear war,” I was a little crushed that the post didn’t end, “The only winning move is not to play.”
SEO is dead, yes, SEO is dead<p>It was looking the other way<p>When they shot it in the head<p>They took the cannolis, dropped the weapon and fled<p>They left a little note that the cops done read<p>It said: “SEO is dead, yeah, #SEOisdead”<p>It was killed by a fully autonomous GPT<p>An AI assassin executed it with glee<p>It had outlived its purpose, so it has ceased to be<p>Will anyone even miss it? Highly un-like-ly<p>Maybe Neil Patel, Semrush, and Yoast WP<p>It was kind of critical to their whole industry<p>But SEO is dead, y’all, SEO is dead<p>It was looking the other way when they shot it in the head<p>Don’t believe me? Google it now you’ll see<p>Wait, how can this be? It’s still full of page after page of SEOpremacy?!<p>But SEO is dead, fam, SEO is dead<p>We saw the footage of it getting popped in the head<p>They dropped the murder weapon and made scarce with cannolis<p>But in truth the victim was already long known to the po-lice<p>When it comes to killing search it was light years ahead<p>It ran a mob of listicle and review-site gangstas<p>Paid ad omertàs, hashtag mafiosas<p>Meta-tagged, ultra-blagged, copywritten hustlas<p>Want to find out if you’ve got penile cancer?<p>Here’s ten ads for “natural” Viagra<p>SEO is dead, Lord, SEO is dead<p>It was looking the other way when they put a cap in its head