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1743 points caspii | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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shmiga ◴[] No.27430926[source]
SEO is so broken, it's not about website content or website quality. It's about how much money you pay to some punks - "SEO experts" who are hacking a system. I'm so sick of that.
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mrtksn ◴[] No.27431135[source]
If you Google stuff like "opening hours of ..." in Turkish(probably in other languages too), since many years the search results are only news websites spamming google, including the Turkish franchise of CNN, the CNN Turk.

The format goes like this: Lately people are searching for XYZ but is it safe to search for XYZ? What experts say for XYZ? To find out continue to read our article.

Then it's followed by wall of text made of keywords(in sentences that don't make sense), if you are lucky there would be the opening hours(which are often not accurate) somewhere down the text.

But that doesn't stop there. Even actual news articles are written for the consumption of the Google bot, the sentences often don't make sence, they are repeated multiple times with the synonyms of one of the words, making it into a lengthy article that doesn't have any meat beyond the title.

I argue that the problem is not SEO experts with low ethics, the problem is the way the business is structured. SEO experts don't do it for the sake of the art but because they are paid to do it. They are paid to do it because it has a positive ROI on bringing eyeballs and people pay Google for eyeballs, then Google pays those who generate the eyeballs.

Isn't it better for Google and everyone involved if you can't find what you are looking for, continuing your search brings more eyeballs? It's not like you are going to switch to Bing? You are also not going to abandon the internet and go to a library.

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eino ◴[] No.27431364[source]
> It's not like you are going to switch to Bing

From personal experience, I switched to another tool (DDG) a couple of years ago. When I occasionally try Google, for 95% of common requests I'm appalled by the results: the top is only SEO garbage. For very specific and precise searches (where people are not trying to game the system), Google is still the best, though.

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simonbarker87 ◴[] No.27431492[source]
Huh, you've given me a realisation - I don't do 'generic searching' on google anymore. I hear people say "google is broken" and I always think "it's fine for me" but thats because I'm searching for specific things, error messages, function calls etc. If I am searching for general interest stuff I tend to search reddit, hacker news or some other topic specific community rather than just search google
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AussieWog93 ◴[] No.27431619[source]
I just realised I do something similar - almost every term I search will have the word "Reddit" appended to it. It's not perfect, but at least the content is intended for human consumption.
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lvncelot ◴[] No.27431803[source]
Same for me, `site:reddit.com` for almost everything that has to do with product recommendations or reviews.
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atatatat ◴[] No.27436186[source]
Putting this here makes it even less likely marketers will miss "gaming reddit" as part of their strategy.
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1. fakedang ◴[] No.27445288[source]
They already do, but mods have a vested interest in keeping communities clean.