The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

As webdeveloper I have a strong feeling that we are writing web for google bot and not for people. For any website I created I have a list from SEO what to add. Like 200 links at each page bottom, different titles, headers, metas, human readable urls without query params, all that canonical urls, nofollow rules etc. Most of this things invisible to users and created only for googlebot.

The problem is, is that the internet at its conception was just a way to host content, not a way to discover content. When discovery was done via word of mouth or extra-internet means, the websites themselves were just for the people that viewed them.

Now, when the website needs to not only contain content, but also be its own advertisement, writing it in a way that will maximize virality is the natural course of action to make sure the site actually gets seen.

This will likely be true until a method of finding webpages that is not based on automated scraping or the page itself.

On the contrary, the Web, being a hypertext system, was definitely always about discovering content. If you found an interesting website, it would typically link to other interesting sites. There used to be ways to systematize these ad-hoc linkings, such as Web rings. And the first attempts to catalogue and categorize the contents of the (then tiny) Web were in the form of human-curated directories à la Yahoo. It’s just that in just a few years it became apparent that this approach could not scale, and search engines based on automatic crawlers became the norm – but again, critically, these too are of course fundamentally dependent on the Web’s discoverability by following hyperlinks!