Comment by freetinker
7 months ago
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