A glitch in the SEO matrix(izzy.co) |
A glitch in the SEO matrix(izzy.co) |
It was looking the other way
When they shot it in the head
They took the cannolis, dropped the weapon and fled
They left a little note that the cops done read
It said: “SEO is dead, yeah, #SEOisdead”
It was killed by a fully autonomous GPT
An AI assassin executed it with glee
It had outlived its purpose, so it has ceased to be
Will anyone even miss it? Highly un-like-ly
Maybe Neil Patel, Semrush, and Yoast WP
It was kind of critical to their whole industry
But SEO is dead, y’all, SEO is dead
It was looking the other way when they shot it in the head
Don’t believe me? Google it now you’ll see
Wait, how can this be? It’s still full of page after page of SEOpremacy?!
But SEO is dead, fam, SEO is dead
We saw the footage of it getting popped in the head
They dropped the murder weapon and made scarce with cannolis
But in truth the victim was already long known to the po-lice
When it comes to killing search it was light years ahead
It ran a mob of listicle and review-site gangstas
Paid ad omertàs, hashtag mafiosas
Meta-tagged, ultra-blagged, copywritten hustlas
Want to find out if you’ve got penile cancer?
Here’s ten ads for “natural” Viagra
SEO is dead, Lord, SEO is dead
It was looking the other way when they put a cap in its head
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.
Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own profits. Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. People complain about the tracking of users/visitors, but the tracking of businesses is just as bad.
They probably have better insights into the economy and market trends than most governments and banks.
The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term expectation of Google's business are not what they were.
And then
> Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane.
Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don't work. They don't know this?
Since ads are a red queen's race, wasting people's attention and assuming we don't want to outright ban them then the next best alternative is to tax them heavily. How about 0.00001 cent per pixel-second-view?
Then people will only put up ads when there's some real value in it, not just to keep up with the competition.
I resort to Duckduckgo and Brave's searches among many others. Even things like Yandex give much deeper dives now.
And I’ve been pretty impressed with Brave search so far. Promising
(This is a joke (or is it?))
And gob help you if you dare search for alternative to _____.
Used to. Now that advertising believe their salvation lies in forums, wadding into the big ones increasingly feels like entering the water at a British beach after the privatisation of Thames Water...
At best you’ll find one very opinionated guys recommendation which may or may not match yours
And given the game is won by the highest bidder, all of the surplus created by technical progress goes to advertising which, as you point out, adds zero value and, in fact, detracts from rational agents making optimal decisions.
This is /exactly/ the kind of market failure where those of us who prefer smaller government want to start talking about appropriate regulation.
https://metaphor.systems/ is pretty good for exactly this kind of thing. The way the search algorithm is designed also make it extremely difficult to game.
For businesses, there is no good alternative to Google. Many are investing a lot of effort and money in social media, but the returns are very low compared to Google.
I’ve yet to try to trial tho so that should help give context how quickly I burn thru 100
If you are trying to sell a product, I know one weird trick: Just make a product that people enjoy, and they will recommend it to others.
No need to pay for advertising, no need to play the SEO game. The only marketing you need for a decent product is a website with docs and a download button.
This works especially well if you have some sort of freemium product, because then the 90% of people who use the free version still act as multipliers.
I don't know if it works for all businesses, but it's worked for me over the last decade or so.
There are plenty of searches where I want to find what real people are thinking, not what some company's article says. This kind of thing could easily be crowd-sourced a la SponsorBlock.
What would a fair review site look like?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't think this is a search problem, I think Google is legitimately surfacing what's available on the Internet for given query. I think this is the dead internet theory at play, and that there just isn't anything valuable to show!
People who would (in the past) run their own website or blog now post that same content on social media, which is why Reddit has become mandatory for people looking for genuine opinions.
Google certainly omits quite a lot, though. Especially smaller sites run by actual people.
Anyone who’s searched for reviews or tech questions recently has experienced this. And it’s slowly eating everything.
The web is turning into nothing but potemkin content.
Yea sometimes LLMs hallucinate, but sometimes websites are just wrong. For a variety of topics LLMs are just a better form of search.
It gave me back "tar -xzvf filename.tar.gz" with a breakdown of what each switch does. I don't think Google's ever been able to intuit what I'm asking for like that.
Ads.
As long as there is even a marginal 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.
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.
I dont really know a good solution either. Targeted ads are incredibly useful to small businesses, and that genie is out of the bottle.
The first five results for me was this SEO spam. I went in and blocked those domains. Now it's all good stuff again.
Google running a social credit system may have unintended consequences though.
(If we discuss “a comprehensive ecosystem of open-source software for big data management” enough, perhaps we can get this thread to rank too.)
PS: secretly, I hope that this post starts ranking for “a comprehensive ecosystem of open source software for big data management”, which is why I have said it verbatim so many times and added a helpful callout at the top for students. To be honest, I'd settle for the 19th spot: just above highadviser.com.https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=%22a+comprehensive+ecosystem...
Edit: DDG's results are not stable for me. I get different results every time I reload. Sometimes it comes up second:
Like bragging about throwing the most empty soda cans out of your car as you drive down the highway.
These Cisco certifications are such a scam tbh. Cisco commands and CLI are the most confusing, illogical designs for any feature. And they make sure to put in tens of thousands of features and hundreds of ways to configure every different feature. Then they create these overpriced courses and pay for their own employees to take every single one. Since Cisco employs a lot of people, and prefers people with Cisco certifications, this creates a lot of demand for the courses.
Most of the certifications could be replaced with a single 2 month networking course that explains the workings of features, provided they redesign their CLI to be slightly usable.
One with external costs imposed upon others.
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.
It's the real content that's going to get disrupted/destroyed.
The Internet now feels like this to me:
https://www.okcu.edu/admin/communications/web/wharrgarbl
See also:
This is already underway and it's already the case that Google is sending you to a bunch of mediocre articles that were written mostly by an AI. The real question is what happens once that trend compounds over the next 2-3 years. It is working right now so it is going to 10x.
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 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 is literally intentful design by Google to make as much revenue as possible while providing as little utility as possible.
The internet as we know it is utterly shaped by this purposeful dystopian SEO dynamic.
(not OC)
Welcome to hell.
Does Google want to win the game, or do they profit from the game continuing?
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.
"That's a very nice Web site you got. Would be a shame if nobody was to find it."
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.
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.
"Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
You're not going to keep doing SEO, because nobody wants to pay money to have their site receive search engine perma-death.
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.
Maybe the cat and mouse are in a symbiotic relationship that lets them both milk the cows.
On top of that the worse the search results, the more likely the user will click an ad rather than an organic result. The Google of old wouldn't have been tempted by that incentive, but that Google is long dead.
Bad search result = more revenue from ads.
Obviously it's a fine balance, they don't want to loose users, but they will have the metrics to (religiously) work from.
As someone who used to run ad campaigns on Google until a couple of years ago, they are doing the same to advertisers. Users will happily click an ad, go back to the result and try another, many many times. Google have systematically made the advertising on search results worse, showing ads more regularly for poorer placements, removing control and visible auditing. It's all so they can extract more revenue from the advertisers.
There is a reason people are using chatgpt as a replacement for google, or appending results with Reddit or Wiki
If I recall correctly, it was made available in response to another big wave of criticism directed towards Google about "Content Farms". It has been interesting to see the difference in response between the "Content Farm" debacle and what we are dealing with currently.
[0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-m...
It is absolutely this, yes. They tell people where to go, and they also profit from the ads they put on the places they tell people to go, and they have no real competition[1]. It has made them one of the most valuable companies on the planet. There is no incentive for them to rank higher quality results over ad-filled pages.
We need to break up big tech.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/un...
They do, a lot actually. We're just not the end users. The advertisers are. Thet don't need to care about us since they're a monopoly. Use Brave Search, DuckDyckGo or something elae to help change that. Get other people to too.
Just for you, especially for you in fact, I went and dug out this link to an interview with Corey Doctorow where he explains his theory of platform of “enshittification”.
https://podtail.com/en/podcast/future-tense-full-program-pod...
I think it will interest you to hear a reasonable theory as to why Google doesn’t care as much about their end users as you might think they should.
Like you said, a first step would be blocking spam domains.
Another would be a return to how the algorithm used work, prioritizing results that are frequently linked to elsewhere using the relevant keywords. In the '00s, this was quickly gamed by companies setting up endless blogs to link to their own products, but I feel it could be mitigated by assigning some kind of trustworthiness score to the sites doing the linking. It shouldn't be hard to recognize that a site being recommended a lot on Reddit or some other well established repository of user-generated content is going to be more genuine than "recommendations" from some random blogspam site nobody's heard of.
1) Google and you are defining spam differently.
2) Spam is adversarial. They have the ability to block spam domains from last week, but it’s an ongoing investment as the adversaries adapt.
That said I do think Google depends too much on human raters who are not customers. It’s caused a lot of drift between the customer’s expectation of quality and Google’s.
by who??? Google itself "blocks" or downgrades spam websites all the time. If they open it up to "the people", the same SEO crowd will rush in with scrapers to decimate competition, including any legit websites. So strange to see people jumping into conspiracy theories here without thinking of the consequences for a second.
Sure, it has its own problems with edit wars and editor politics, but compared to the cesspool of SEO spam on Google, Wikipedia is an information paradise.
I rather suspect that they'll regain some popularity. Probably not general-purpose ones, but a variety of directories each covering a specific kind of site.
> Anything completely manual isn't going to be "web-scale".
True, but even so, it might still be an improvement. Especially if it's hundreds of different directories, each with their own tight focus.
By date?
Apple blocks all tracking in Safari by default and builds search engine without ads for iCloud+ subscribers.
Personally I can't find much on Google if I'm actually searching for something I don't know about. Finding the local mechanic is fine but querying a programming question, health problem or recipe is absolutely fucked. I sold all my Google stock recently but should have done so sooner. The value they have is in gmail and gsuite accounts but I can see the search business is circling the drain.
Conspiracy theory: they love showing shitty sites because those sites display adverts making Google money.
"Google knows this, so it adds a “Question and Answers” block before the first SERP result, probably diverting a tremendous amount of traffic away from that page."
They scrape answers from sites that they used to send traffic to and publish it themselves. In many cases, though, those sites won't exist without the incentive of organic search traffic.
I get why Google does it, but it does create a feedback loop where less of that info will be out there to scrape.
The market is pretty efficient, and there are always alternatives. If you aren't lazy, you can save a huge amount of money by not buying advertised products.
On the rare occasions I see an ad for something cool that I want, I search for it on aliexpress and 90% of the time find it for 1/3 the price.
Whenever someone tells you that they bought something because of an ad, you should make them feel a little embarrassed about it. There should be mild social punishment for admitting an ad hijacked your brain and made you get out your wallet - it means you're a sucker, a rube, a feebleminded lazybones.
A lot of SEO is driven by local business owners who hire SEO people with dubious track records that make big promises. They invariably clutter up their websites with 10,000 articles along the lines of "best plumber in dallas".
It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.
If Google was putting significant resources towards combating SEO spam instead of encouraging it, the sites returned from a query (e.g. the sites that make Google the most money) would be the ones that the user most wanted, not the ones that maximally participate in Google's ad-extortion business.
It's incredibly expensive to rank highly for something. There are tips and tricks to make your site amenable to the search engines, but it takes a lot of time or money to get it to actually notice you.
That doesn't even make sense. SEOs exist to make sure websites are more consumable by bots for search indexing. They likely have no backend experience or much experience working directly with css/html, and are more likely dealing with full stack developers who have no desire to understand how their code is functional for users but isn't consumable by bots. The most successful deal with brick and mortar companies which require actual capital to create and not just SEO skillz, and anyone with a brain would know dropshipping is so 2014 (there's like a million of these failed journeys documented on random boards like blackhatworld where people try to monetize search like you suggested, but it's a hella minority because we are deep into the enshittification of search). SEO is important to deal with things like the proliferation of angular 1, which was a hellhole abyss for startups in search because google wouldn't index their shit and developers needed to iterate fast. Hell, a large part of the react community is based around things like server side rendering just to get around google bot refusing to let JavaScript load and search results were polluted with handlebars variables for years because of that. Google bot still has problem rendering webpages while I do all of that shit all day with google's own puppeteer.
Tl;dr: SEOs are a cottage industry to help companies deal with the ongoing enshittification of search, and basing their value or success on whether they could launch their own site isn't a good benchmark.
-- Capt. Jack Sparrow, SEO guy
> Ads.
> As long as there is even a marginal 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.
Search will only get worse for google users, not for google or google customers.
Google can easily produce only quality search results, by penalising a result by the number of ads it serves.
They don't do this.
They can identify the SEO people and companies, and heavily penalise their clients.
They don't do this either.
They can, because you're logged in, allow you to maintain a blacklist. They don't.
Trust me, for google this is an easy problem to solve; it's just that, for google, this is not a problem, but works as intended behaviour.
Retargeting may be the only exception, although it is annoying as hell, it won't let people forget about your stuff (and comes very cheaply because very few people will ever see it), so probably generates positive returns... But i'm not even sure about that one.
This was even true before search, in web directories. It has a limited amount of slots, you need to be on it at all and as high as possible.
Well that is a ridiculous problem that only exists because of Google's UI.
What if, for instance, thet slightly randomized search results?
Have you seen a 419 scam? Doesn't have any ads. Just a direct intro to get scammed.
The article links to a tweet where hustlebros build a 500-page WP site with "best shoes 2023" type articles with affiiate links. It's already semi-automated, AI GC is just the final piece.
I didn't claim its free of gaming, but I am claiming the quality of search results for "x" vs "x reddit" is notably higher for the latter in most cases that I personally use search for.
"We may not be best. But we are credible and big enough that we make a shit-ton of money on our product and can afford this incredibly expensive ad."
Today, an ad possibly just means "Google matched two suckers with each other and will pocket the difference."
Old content is still there, but new content is of noticeably lower quality. Many subreddits have moved to minimal moderation or stopped it altogether. Engagement in places I used to frequent like /r/Games (which didn't even participate in the strike) is both down considerably and of lower quality.
Reddit, like Twitter, is too big to fail overnight, but they are essentially zombies at this point. Their growth potential has been neutered and their most valuable users (the 1% making 60% of the quality content) are actively toying with alternatives.
SEO is a $122 billion/year industry. That doesn't seem like a cottage industry to me. And it exists in order to get companies to rank higher in search results.
I think the SEO industry is a large force helping to make the web much worse.
AOL started putting ads on your dashboard less than 2 years after it launched.
There wasn't a very long period of ad-free internet.
I wonder how this could be implemented at a technical level. How do you avoid gaming the system?
This feels like one of the last bastions of the true web left, the small web that is actually interlinked, not the dead ends you find in your ecommerce or social networking sites.
But it too is disappearing fast, I for one will miss it.
From food to manufacturing to music and other cultural endeavours: making communities small(er) might be an interesting counter (r)evolution.
And also yea three cents for every two searches over the 1k monthly limit is pretty trivial lol. So nvm that shouldn’t b something to give me pause
How can I get in touch?
That's because it's completely inaccurate. It's just a meme propagated by HN and some others, with essentially zero correlation to how decision-making and prioritization actually happens over there.
The idea that clickbait is somehow good for Google's bottom line is absurd on its face, before we even tackle the idea that ads' interests are controlling search ranking
I guess I am simply unable to see so I will ask: why do you think the idea as outlined in the GP is so illogical?
For manually curated content, Google and other search companies were solving that in 1998 because manual curation wasn't feasible for the amount of content on the internet. It's been 25 years since then, and we're not exactly producing less content online.
People want manually curated information. They don’t want automation which by its very nature, as a fixed set of parameters, can and will be gamed.
What does "manual curation" mean in this context? I think it really just means "absence of spam/low quality content", which manual curation is not strictly necessary for.
Reddit has avoided
[0] objectively quantifying importance is an entirely different can of worms, but people know what's important to them
[1] https://www.bea.gov/index.php/system/files/papers/WP2017-9.p...
Amazon, Microsoft, Apple are more diversified.
They don’t care about good name and long term viability. As far as they’re concerned they can just sell when the stock tanks.
That being the case unless we stop using money their business is quite sustainable.
'Gamed' as in people would block the most ad-infested pages which just so happened to be the ones which made Google the most money?
I can assure you that any solution you can think of that will improve web search will be used in the exact opposite way you imagine.
Seems the problem's not the blocking itself then, and the whole feature didn't need to be removed, just its use as a metric.
One wonders how much bullshit might have been solved through a .005% increase in Google's payroll...
For spammy websites, you don’t review every one individually. But you have an algorithm that e.g. downranks them, and you AB test it.
They probably already have this strategy now, just not deployed for one reason or another. (For example, it might be expensive and unreliable to scan every website.) But if Google loses enough traffic to a competitor, they’ll be forced to do something.
Of course they do, but people pay crazy money for this and it plays the important role in Google's market valuation, so it's in Google's best interests to continue chanting the Big Data Big Money mantra. It doesn't help that the myth/meme is strongly backed by the whole cyberpunk genre, as people love the dystopian themes of "big corporations know everything about you, down to your most secret desires you don't even realize yourself".
And it probably even work by some small but statistically significant margin, compared to some arbitrarily picked baseline, so they can even back this up if necessary.
The king is naked, though.
Still, people buy a lot of AdWords and similar, and occasionally I see a relevant ad I click. BTW ads within Facebook are usually of much better quality (for me as a reader), likely because they can correlate.more sources inside FB.
I've done the math on this for a few small companies. I an thoroughly convinced that this is just not true for many companies. The vast amount of sales attributed to online ad campaigns are sales that a company would have gotten anyway even without the ads.
The opportunities are still there in local minima, places where it's too small for Google to optimize. But the trend is clear.
Costs go up because winners have been found. Like monopolies in capitalism.
It works for them.
They might need to make it work a tad more for their customers if they had to, but right now they apparently don't.
I sometimes click on ads about things related to IT and programming, if they mention something novel and important, just to be aware of the landscape, and what potential competition are pushing.
I see ads relatively rarely though, because I run uBlock Origin. So the ads I see are usually placed in context with some care, not just randomly tucked on to an unrelated webpage. Most of the ads are really poor, as I can see if I use an unprotected browser.
This is a simple test. Turn off all of your ads for a year, compare against the previous. Write a blog post about it, destroy the industry.
Some time in 1980s Coca-Cola decided that they have enough of an iconic status, and they don't need as much advertising on expensive large surfaces. They prudently lowered such advertisement a bit, and checked. Shockingly, they noticed a decline in sales. They reverted to the old policy.
Concretely: if I am the only pie baker in the world (I won), who else would bid against me for "place to buy pie"?
My unsubstantiated hypothesis is that google has gotten better at cross-promoting - so they could target people who like cake, increasing the market and competition for bids, making prices go up.
I believe there are some agreements for larger corporations to continue to promote things even if it is not necessary. People with funny money can treat ad markets like billboards.
Another fucked up aspect is that the government often runs ads to promote its own policies.
Much like real markets there is sometimes unnatural activity that keeps it moving.
Also if you aren't buying anything by clicking them, advertisers are ignoring you because you aren't a valuable user to them.
You are most likely reaping what you sew. Which shows that the ad networks are actually working.
