Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge
Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge
SEO experts got very rich filling the web full of garbage. But are they to blame or is Google?
Yes. They both did.
Google came to prominence because it sidestepped the first gen SEO of keywords.
Then it became a bloated corp run by MBAs.
SEO took off and it did little to nothing as its search platform was now there to deliver eye balls to advertisers.
It’s worse than that, in Google’s current antitrust suit, the government showed that Google stopped searching for your exact text…. Instead they replace your text with the most profitable text that’s close to what you’re searching for. So you can’t actually get better results by refining your query anymore.
Meaning that Google is defrauding their users (making it look like they searched for something they didn’t give you the results for) and they defrauded AdWords clients because I paid for an ad when someone searches for X but Google manipulated a search for Y into X so that I’d have to pay more even though the user didn’t actually use my keyword.
Aaaaand we wonder why Google sucks now.
….. always the same reason that a company turns hostile to their clients….. “I’m big enough I don’t care, and I want more money, fuck you”
Wired retracted that article because the writer misunderstood the slides.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
I feel this, especially when I'm looking up technical information. I'll specifically exclude keywords and they show up in the first result.
Half the time I feel the search engine doesn't care what I'm looking for.
Same algorithm that sends you right wing bullshit whenever you try to find anything. I sure as fuck don't want to see that but they seem to.
Many things have ruined the Internet, corporate greed, the proliferation of low quality content, paywalls, advertising, websites infested with user registration, AI, bots, shitty web page builders, etc... This was such a great article except the alligator was only five and a half feet long.
I noticed something was wrong when every article repeated what I was asking as many times as possible.
They're all pretty much written in the same style now, and it's next to impossible to find the actual information you're looking for under all the bullshit.
I don't blame SEO 'experts' or Google. I blame greed.
right, we're all guilty -- not the powers that be that enabled it in the first place with the sole aim of fleecing the masses
Does anyone ever talk about how we can fix it?
Use different services.
We're already in the process of fixing it by using Lemmy instead of reddit.
Something that has been SEO'd for Google is still going to feature prominantly on ddg or bing. There are other reasons to switch off Google, but seo isn't going to stop being a problem.
I started using Kagi. By paying for the search engine, at least I can ensure the search engine's goals align with mine, instead of with whoever pays most for advertisement. I haven't used it for a long time yet, but so far I'm satisfied with its results!
I've been using Kagi for about half a year now, and I've definitely been very happy with it. As you pointed out, the fact that you pay for it with actual money and not with your attention (ie. ad views) means that they actually have an incentive to show you good results instead of endless walls of spammy links that lead to pages using their ad network.
People don't seem to realize that Google's not a search engine company with an ad network, but an ad network company with a search engine: the ads pay for all of Google's services, so they're incentivized to fill your search results with bullshit that you have to dig through, but that uses their ad network – every useless spam link you have visit when looking for the thing you actually searched for means more 💰 for Google.
The fact that so many big online services are ad-funded has led to the situation where people seem to believe that we're entitled to have everything for free online. While open source projects run by volunteers are definitely a thing (as is obvious considering where we are), I don't think it's reasonable to assume that every online service should have rely on voluntary donations and volunteer work, and that developers should work on your free pet service during their time off from their actual work
Hate to bust your bubble but Kagi is just a fancy meta search engine that still uses bing,google and a few others for its queries. Its not a real search engine in its own right. A good searxng instance like https://paulgo.io will give you similar results without paying 10$ a month for it.
Support people who host these free and open source services out of pocket with donations. Not yet another business offering yet another subscription. Promising 'were not like those other guys, for reals jut trust us' while not being able to gaurentee they won't turn into greedy bastards and start whittling your user rights/rolling in the ads later.
I think it's not in our hand. We can only hide annoyances by a content blocker.
We need some 10 foot alligators to fix it.
SEO experts AND GOOGLE
Unregulated capitalism did.
I did a word search of the article and capitalism wasn’t mentioned once. How can we heal the illness if no one can mention the disease.
Just keep calling it out. I'm hopeful things can get better
Why is it “or”..? It’s as if the Verge has lost the ability to write a non-clickbait title.
And the answer is “both have” of course. The folks who make the game are as guilty as those who played it.
Every time I see an article from the verge all I can think of is Stefan and his disastrous PC Build video. The Verge lost all credibility after that for me
That article downplays SEO and mostly argues that Google is responsible, and it still gives Google way too much credit. I mean, it's gonna take a lot more evidence to make me believe they broke the internet by accident, for one. People knew all this crap would happen before Google was even a thing.
Greed broke it. Mostly Google’s, but you’re right, if it weren’t Google, it would have been someone else.
Yes.
Perhaps this is why nearly everyone hates SEO and the people who do it for a living: the practice seems to have successfully destroyed the illusion that the internet was ever about anything other than selling stuff.
Ah, the author is young. Many of us remember the Internet before e-commerce.
It was the battle between SEO "experts" and Google that did it.
Greed of both SEO and Google.
Permanently Deleted
Kind of like when George Carlin said ‘if you want better politicians; make better people.’
They both contributed.
What strikes me is that Google doesn't fix some of the blatant offenders. For example, the other day I was looking for tablets, so I seached for "best tablets of 2023". And it's obvious that many websites are auto-generated, that the content itself was written several years ago, and the years have magically been updated to the present. Half of the first ten links are to pages like this.
I don't expect Google to de-list things. But I do expect that the developers would look at the top ten results for common searches like this and penalize major websites for intentionally creating deceptive content.
Similarly, I would expect all search engines to lower ratings on websites that are ad-heavy. Users want information, not sparkly ads. This is easy to detect and optimize for.
But hey, people wanna make their money, so they'll do what they do.
I think this 8000+ word article's length is indicative of the "real" answer: it's complicated.
I read the whole thing. Lots of great personalities and examples spanning from AltaVista to Large Language models and everything in between.
I think the quote that resonated with me the most, to summarize this article's main thesis in a sound bite, was this:
You can’t just be the most powerful observer in the world for two decades and not deeply warp what you are looking at
In essence, it's the fault of having a dominant algorithm dictating what the Internet "is". Google is the tool most people use for most of their information seeking. Thus, getting a high ranking from Google is the difference between success and failure.
imho, the only real solution is decentralization. Federated services, local newspapers, new search engines, idk.
And yet, Google is still my default search engine. So I'm part of the problem.
It was the unholy marriage of the two
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Maybe I could even repackage such a tragedy into a sensationalized anecdote for a viral article about the people who do SEO for a living, strongly implying that nature was here to punish the bad guy while somehow also assuming the ethical high ground and pretending I hadn’t been hoping this exact thing would happen from the start.
He was the kind of tall, charming man who described himself multiple times as “a nerd,” and he pointed out that even though working directly with search engine rankings is “no longer monetizing at the highest payout,” the same “core knowledge of SEO” remains relevant for everything from native advertising to social media.
As sunset turned to dusk, I found Daron Babin again, and he started telling me about one of his signature moves, back in the ’90s, involving fake domain names: “I could make it look like it was somebody else, but it actually redirected to me!” What he and his competitors did was legal but well beyond what the dominant search engine allowed.
Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke, beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm, frantically pulling levers behind the scenes but ultimately somewhat hapless.
Google was slow to allow someone to talk with me, possibly because of the giant PR clusterfuck that has been the company’s past year (accused by the federal government of being a monopoly; increasingly despised by the public; losing ground to Reddit, TikTok, and large language models), so I decided to start by meeting up with a chipper, charismatic man named Duane Forrester.
Once he represented Bing, Forrester more or less stopped drinking at conferences, as had long been the case for his counterpart at Google, an engineer named Matt Cutts, who helped build and then ran the company’s web spam team before stepping back in 2014 and leaving in 2016.
The original article contains 8,379 words, the summary contains 336 words. Saved 96%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
You saved 96%, but the result still seems quite fluffy. Perhaps this kind of article is more challenging to summarize.
It reads like a start of some dude’s homoerotic fanfic, reminiscing about the famous dudes he used to bang.
wtf, the internet is better than ever
Hah... HAH!
If your perspective is that of an advertising company, then I can agree.
If your perspective that of a user, then no fucking way.
Advertisers and those that use them are trying to suck every penny from every corner of the web using psychological manipulation to get you to buy things you don’t need with ever increasing precision.
The internet of today is a shell of what it used to be. Either you are too young to have experienced the good internet, or you work in advertising.