> Then the worry was Blogrolls might be considered link farms so they slowly started to be phased out. Then the biggie: when Google deliberately filtered out all the free hosted sites from the SERP’s...
That's all observable fact.
Why? Because they were taking up space in the first 20 organic returns knocking out corporate and commercial sites and the sites likely to become paying customers were complaining.
I think the more reasonable, less diabolical motive was that the blogs and free hosted sites were largely link farms that no one wanted to visit.
It sucks for the few legitimate pages on those platforms, but when most of the legitimate page is the rare gem in a minefield of automated copies of other blogs, just with SEO links and ads inserted.
It's like a comments section: without moderation or captchas or both, a "thriving local community" on, say, a small town news site can be overwhelmed by automated pharmaceuticals spam. Then the newspaper kills the comment section, not out of any malice towards the original community but because they don't want to deal with the spam.
And yeah, dealing with spam and black hat SEO does take resources. If you (or worse, your chosen blog host) don't keep the weeds down, soon your pasture will be overrun and burned off.
Where I don’t agree with you is in the portrayal of the Web as largely comprised of link farms and “few legitimate pages”. I spend a lot of my time cataloging the hidden corners of the Web and it is mostly individuals working on their personal Web projects. Spam is simple to identify (much more so than ‘clickbait’) and many of the reasons people don’t read personal websites any more isn’t because interesting and mind-blowing projects on the Web are too rare. (I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I feel like they are more common on the Web than on social media.)
That sounds interesting. Do you have a list of some interesting projects that you're willing to share?
Thankyou for asking. If you know of any sweet links, pass them along!
The problem is that Blogspam is now a (legitimate) industry much bigger than Google can manage.
Google Search became a playground for marketing firms to dump content made by low-paid freelancers with algorithmically chosen keywords, links and headers. It's SEO on large scale. Everything is monitored via analytics and automatically posted to Wordpress. Every time Google tweaks its algorithm to catch it, they're able to A-B test and then change thousands of texts all at once.
Personal blogs can't even dream about competing with that.
In fact, those companies are actively competing with personal blogs by themselves: via tools like SEMRush and social media monitoring, they know which blogs are trending and use their tools to produce copycat content re-written by freelancers and powered by their SEO machine.
I know a startup that is churning 10 thousand blogposts per day on clients blogs, each costing from 2 to 5 dollars for a freelancer to write according to algorithmically defined parameters.
Just wait until they get posts written via OpenAI-style machine learning: the quality will be even lower.
Not only that: there's no need for black hat SEO anymore. Blogposts from random clients have links to others clients blogs, and it is algorithmically generated in order to maximize views and satisfy Google's algorithm. They have a gigantic pool of seemingly unconnected blogs to link to, so why not use it.
The irony is that companies buy this kind of blogspam to skip paying AdSense. Why pay when you can get organic search results? So not only they're damaging the usefulness of the SERP, they're directly eating Google's bottom line. These blogs also have ZERO paid advertising inside them, since they're advertising themselves.
That's the reason Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yandex still have "old web" results.
That puts Google in a very difficult position and IMO they're not wrong to fight it.
But look at it another way: you have lots of humans writing - and it's all of varying quality. Why not let the humans decide what's good? The early Web was curated by humans, who kept directories, Smart.com 'expert' pages, websites and blogrolls that tried to show where quality could be found. Google's bot war (and the idea that Google is the sole authority on quality) eliminated these valuable resources as collateral damage.
Maybe the problem is that PageRank (or whatever they call it these days) has run its course. I mean, it supposed to gauge "what humans think is good", but it's failing miserably. It's indeed time for a more curated, artisanal, web.
What gives me pause here is all the anecdotes in this thread about other engines getting results right. If the real answer is "PageRank has been successfully flooded by bots", then everyone would have bad results.
What I suspect, off nearly no evidence, is that Google is using ad tracking to inform a notion of search relevancy. My nearly unjustified belief is that that system is the one being flooded by bots.
Piracy is gone, but you will find hundreds of automatically generated credit card phishing sites full of Google Ads, sometimes promising pirated versions but serving a trojan, sometimes showing a credit card form. Some of them are on the first page, sometimes before legitimate websites.
But if their efforts in fighting it are a large part of the reason that Google search results are getting downright bad, then they're wrong in how they're fighting in.
What I mean is: I don't think their fight is misguided or evil this time, they're trying to keep the result pages useable for end users. They're just doing a terrible job out of it. (Or: they're doing a worse job than spammers)
Isn't Google responsible for making Internet advertising accessible and widespread? They developed and launched AdWords (2000) and AdSense (2003).
Absolutely right. I recently started a blog, and was disheartened to learn that I have sign up for accounts with several search engines, conform to their standards and rules, give them a bunch of data... and still sometimes have mysterious issues with indexing with no real recourse. How much time and effort do I really want to spend to play the seo game? I have a job, projects, and hobbies, I don't have the time or patience to play their game of "let's fuck with things randomly until you get indexed and ranked higher". That was fun for a few hours, but I'm done with it.
And, of course, consider having a blogroll of the sites you follow, which is all of our little way of contributing to the effort of finding each other. :)
If you have an older post that's great but not changed, it'll become less prominent. So go in, edit in some changes, and now it's fresh and ready to be indexed prominently again.
If this is how it goes, I guess it helps in a way. The articles we care about get attention and don't drop off. But there's so much of the old web we might lose in the haystack.
> Rumors spread that large link pages (for surfing) might be considered “link farms” (and yes on SEO sites they were but these things eventually trickle down to little personal site webmasters too) so these started to be phased out. Then the worry was Blogrolls might be considered link farms so they slowly started to be phased out. Then the biggie: when Google deliberately filtered out all the free hosted sites from the SERP’s (they were not removed completely just sent back to page 10 or so of the Google SERP’s) and traffic to Tripod and Geocities plummeted. Why? Because they were taking up space in the first 20 organic returns knocking out corporate and commercial sites and the sites likely to become paying customers were complaining.
https://ramblinggit.com/2018/08/when-the-social-silos-fall/
SEO seems to have become a huge obstacle course that smaller websites can't play.