Comment by barbariangrunge
7 months ago
Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums
Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters pushing content to gain followers to sell ads or other stuff because nobody else’s videos ever surface. Just a million people gaming the algorithm and the only winners are the people who devote the most time to it. And by the way, would I like to sign up for their patreon and maybe one of their online courses?
I think a case can be made that the spam problem can be traced all the way back to Google buying Doubleclick.
Its really easy to spot the crap websites that are scaping content-creating websites ... because they monetize by adding ads.
If Google was _only_ selling ads on the search results page, then it could promote websites that are sans ads.
Instead, it is incentivised to push users to websites that contain ads, because it also makes money there.
And that means scraping other sites to slap your ads onto them can be very profitable for the scammers.
They hired people who introduce Jack Welch methods.
This is like in that Steve Jobs video about product people being kicked out and exchanged by ones who dont care about product:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
They will not make good search. That is not their priority.
We need a Reverse Google search that will weed out the garbage.
https://kagi.com/ de-prioritizes SEO ad sites and also lets you blacklist sites from your search reaults. Never going back to google after trying it
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Reverse of Google Search is also Google Search, due to how the ranking works.
A bit chicken-and-egg. Another perspective: Google’s system incentivizes SEO spam.
Search for a while hasn’t been about searching the web as much as it has been about commerce. It taps commercial intent and serves ads. It is now an ad engine; no longer a search engine.
Best exercise bike articles, and such, are what lots of people people actually search for. There is no incentive to provide quality work which answers these queries hence the abundance of spam and ads.
If you want to purchase consumer products at your own expense and offer an impartial opinion on each of them then you will have no problem getting ranked highly on google. You will lose a lot of money doing so, however, and will also be plagiarized to death in a month. The sites you want to be rid of will outrank you for your own content, I have been there and have the t-shirt.
> Best exercise bike articles, and such, are what lots of people people actually search for
Google doesn’t have to return the SEO-optimized page. Google has other options:
- Return 10 results of the 10 top products,
- Derank any site that seems SEO-optimized,
- Derank any commercial site,
- Derank any site with a cookie banner (implying the user is tracked and the writer is trying to write what the user wants to read) or the infamous mailing list popup,
- Prioritize comparisons from brick-and-mortar journals, or give credentials to other vectors of trust,
- Act as a paid directory, where only paid answers appear,
- Return individual positive and negative comments about products, extracted from review pages, maybe even in a graph (“Good for USB-C according to 95% of the reviews, provides an electric shock according to 7% of non-affiliated comments”).
There WERE many options. Google CHOSE to rank awful sites that provide decreased value, and worse than that, it chose that all other sites won’t be viable, killing them. Google chose the face of the internet today.
Absolutely this. I don't think many people consider how odd it is that the largest internet advertising company in the world and the largest search engine company in the world are one and the same, and just how overt a conflict of interest that is, so far as providing quality service goes. It would be akin to if the largest telephone service company in the world was also the largest phone maker in the world. Oh wait, that did happen [1] - and we broke them up because it's obviously extremely detrimental to the functioning of a healthy market.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
For me what killed search was 2016, after that year if some search term is "hot news" it becomes impossible to learn anything about it that wasn't published in the last week and you just get the same headline repeated 20 times in slightly different wording about it.
After that I only use search for technical problems, and mouth to mouth or specific authors for everything else.
Yes, this is a thing I find really frustrating about Google. Especially as I often search for old news stories to find out what people were saying on a topic a few years ago in order to give some context to more recent stories.
Most of the problems I complain about are not related to SEO spam but to Google including sites that does not contain my search terms anywhere despite my use of doublequotes and the verbatim operator.
As for SEO spam a huge chunk of it would have disappeared I think if Google had created the much requested personal blacklist that we used to ask them for.
It was always "actually much harder than anyone of you who don't work here can imagine for reasons we cannot tell or you cannot understand" or something like that problem, but bootstraped Kagi managed to do it - and their results are so much better that I don't usually need it.
I've heard this argument again and again, but I never see any explanation as to why SEO is suddenly in the lead in this cat-and-mouse game. They were trying ever since Google got 90%+ market share.
I think it's more likely that Google stopped really caring.
Well yeah, it's in the article - at some point, they switched completely to metrics (i.e. revenue) driven management and forgot that it's the quality of results that actually made Google what it is. And, with a largely captive audience (Google being the default-search-engine-that-most-people-don't-bother-or-don't-know-how-to-change in Chrome, Android, on Chromebooks etc.), they arguably don't have to care anymore...
Well, it's in the name. SEO is a fancy name for trying to game whatever heuristics Google employs to form their SERPs. It's just that at some point those heuristics shifted from rewarding "quality content" as defined by the disgruntled towards enshitification.
There are various kinds of SEO - internal: technical, on-page and external. A long time ago Google had an epiphany that instead of trying to make sense out of sites themselves they could offload that effort to website administrators and started ranking pages how well they implement technical elements helping Google index the web. For a very long time that was synonymous with white-hat SEO. Since Google search was in part based on web-of-links, various shady tactics to inflate number of indexed backlinks and boost rankings. That was black-hat SEO.
These days Google search puts tremendous focus on on-page SEO. So much that as long as the internal structure of a site is indexable (no dead links, internal backlinks, meta info) it is typically better to hire copywriters spitting out LLM-like robotic mumblings than to try and optimize further.
Massive media companies finally caught on and started churning out utter shit because it's wildly profitable.
When the 'trusted websites' caught on and embraced the game, Google was apparently helpless to stop it.
I don't know, but Youtube seems to have a more solid algorithm. I'm typically not subscribed to any channel, yet the content I want to watch does find me reasonably well. Of course, heavily promoted material also, but I just click "not interested in channel" and it disappears for a while. And I still get some meaningful recommendations if I watch a video in a certain topic. Youtube has its problems, of course, but in the end I can't complain.
I don't think youtube is trying that hard to desperately sell stuff to you via home screen recommendation algorithm. And I agree its bearable and what you describe works cca well, albeit ie I am still trying to get rid of anything related to Jordan Peterson whom I liked before and detest now after his drug addiction / mental breakdown, it just keeps popping back from various sources, literal whack-a-mole.
I wish there was some way to tell "please ignore all videos that contain these strings, and I don't mean only for next 2 weeks".
Youtube gets their ads revenue from before/during video, so they can be nicer to users.
What I don't understand about this explanation is that Google's results are abysmal compared to e.g. DuckDuckGo or even Brave search. (I haven't tried Kagi, but people here rave about it as well.) Sure, all the SEO is targeting googlebot, but Google has by far more resources to mitigate SEO spam than just about anyone else. If this is the full explanation, couldn't Google just copy the strategies the (much) smaller rivals are using?
Have you read the article this thread is about?
To summarize it: Google reverted an algorithm that detected SEO spams in 2019.
(Note that I never work for Google and I don't know whether it's true or not. It's just what this article says.)
I wasn't responding to the article; I was responding to the claim that Google's results are bad because of all the SEO. It's a claim I've heard from Google apologists including some people I know at Google. I think it's nonsense both for the reasons I stated and for the reasons enumerated in the article.
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When a large search engine deranks spam websites, the spam websites complain! Loudly! With Google they have a big juicy target with lots of competing ventures for an antitrust case; no such luck for Kagi or DDG.
This is an interesting theory. Is there evidence that it's happening? Is Big SEO unreasonably effective at lobbying the Justice Department?
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I've been using Kagi for a while, and I find that it delivers better results in a cleaner presentation.
spam didn't kill search. Google willingness to promote spam for ads killed Google. Google is not search.
Machine learning is probably as much or even more susceptible to SEO spam.
Problem is that the rules of search engines created the dubious field of SEO in the first place. They are not entirely the innocent victim here.
Arcane and intransparent measures get you ahead. So arcane that you instantly see that it does not correspond with quality content at all, which evidently leads to a poor result.
I wish there was an option to hide every commercial news or entertainment outlet completely. Those are of course in on SEO for financial reaesons.
>I wish there was an option to hide every commercial news or entertainment outlet completely.
There's alway plugins or you can subscribe to Kagi, although I don't think there's any blocklist preconfigured for "all commercial news websites"
Hard disagree. As another reply mentions, just compare the alternatives such as Kagi that aren’t breaking search by pursuing ad growth.
Kagi isn't amazing, it's just not bad and it really makes plain how badly Google has degraded into an ad engine. All it takes to beat Google is giving okay quality search results.
These search companies should have hired moderators to manually browse results and tag them based on keywords instead of leaving tagging up to content and info creators. The entire results game became fixated on trending topics and SEO spam that it became a game of insider trick trading, that's what makes results everywhere so terrible now.
In a bid for attention, only the fraudsters are winning, well, the platforms are winning lots of money from selling advertising, I guess that's why they're perfectly fine with not fixing results and ranking for many years now. I'm not sure there is a way back to real relevance now, there's no incentive for these large companies to fix things, and the public has already become used to the gamified system to go back to behaving themselves.
This explodes for search terms dealing with questions related to bugs or issues or how to dos. Almost all top results are YT videos, each of which will follow the same pattern. First 10 secs garbage followed by request for subscribe and/or sponsorship content then followed by what you want.
SEO Spam didn't kill search so much as Google failed to retain Matt Cutts or replicate his community involvement https://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-resigns-googl...
What did he used to do ? Your comment seems contradictory cutts seem to be on anti spam but your comment implies seo did not kill search . Is seo not part of spam?
Even when matt_cutts used to be here it was still impossible to get him (or anyone else) to care about search results including lots of results I never asked for.
Not low quality pages that spammed high ranking words but pages that simply wasn't related to the query at all as evidenced by the fact that they didn't contain the keywords I searched for at all!
It's like "Do some SEO magic and Tada!"
And who forgot the recent Reddit story.
Could you link it please? I have unfortunately no idea what you are referencing
Much agreed, and this is prompting me to experiment with other search engines to see if they cut off also the interesting humans sites. With todays google I feel herded.
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This is the correct insight. Google has enough machine learning prowess that they could absolutely offload, with minimal manhours, the creation of a list ranking a bunch of blogspam sites and give them a reverse score by how much they both spam articles or how much they spread the content over the page. Then apply that score to their search result weights.
And I know they could because someone did make that list and posted it here last year.
I'm waiting for folks to implement a Reverse Google Search.