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Comment on Digg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam

SEO is like CGI. What you don’t like is bad CGI. What you don’t notice is good CGI.

There’s many abuses of SEO and many ways it’s used quite badly. What you don’t notice is when it’s done very well. It’s one reason that these days, a large part of the time the thing you search for is on the first page of results. If you know how to search well, SEO helps you find the things you’re searching for.

I know people will disagree and probably ridicule, but i’m not talking out my ass. I’ve been on the internet since 1994, and I remember a time when finding things involved sometimes scouring mange many pages of search results. SEO is one reason that’s less common. And I will say that search did indeed reach a peak and has come down a bit from there thanks to AI bullshit and things like Google’s bullshit about returning ads and prioritizing revenue over usefulness. But it’s still better with SEO than it was without.

Add that to the fact that best practices for SEO has of course changed over the years in ways that have also gotten better for end users in finding content.

And this is again not a full defense of SEO at all. There are many MANY bad actors out there trying to abuse SEO. But, again, that’s the bad SEO that you notice, not the good SEO that you do not notice. So THAT part of the “SEO industry” is absolutely caustic cancer, sure.

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SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Fuck that, being back boolean operators!!!

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- SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Absolutely 100%. It is so frustrating to search for a couple of terms and have the search engine just ignore one or two of them, like no your stupid AI does not understand what I actually want please just give me what I fucking asked for.
  
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- daychilde@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  ¿Por qué no los dos?
  
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Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

SEO is one reason that’s less common.

No it isn’t. SEO is about faming the search engines to place their data ahead of everything whether relevant or not.

Yahoo was fantastic in it’s time because it was human curated. No SEO could bullshit a person reading the page and categorizing it.

Google was fantastic at the start because SEO couldn’t game the system. Google was famous in the early days for maintaining quality by keeping their algorithms secret and constantly changing so that SEO couldn’t break their search.

I’m speaking as someone who was first on the Internet in the 80’s.

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brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
No, you’ve got a point… Actually you’re right. To an extent.

But I’d argue the “bad” part of SEO is just too tempting. It’s clearly winning out, across the entire internet, unless you can look at me with a straight face and say “Google search is fine.” Or that discoverability of small genuine services is fine. It’s definitely not; it’s a miracle any business is surviving as a pure web app anymore.

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- daychilde@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  You also have a point. HOW DARE WE AGREE. :)
  
  Well, except that I think that - to a decent extent - the changing requirements for SEO generally have still improved it. I’m comparing to the days of keyword stuffing, which doesn’t work anymore, for example. Nowadays, it does have to be text that flows and is somewhat natural.
  
  THAT said, I will myself point to recipe sites that give you a novel before the recipe for SEO purposes. I’m certainly not saying it’s perfect by any means.’
  
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