How SEO Ruined the Internet

Re:How SEO Ruined the Internet by ivanche on Monday April 06, 2020 @07:11AM (#22792645)

Interesting. Why do you think that content creators wouldn't see `protein content brussels sprouts` in "keyword analysis tools"? Why do you think they wouldn't create millions of blog posts containing words `protein content brussels sprouts` or countless variations thereof?

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Re:How SEO Ruined the Internet by purerandomness on Monday April 06, 2020 @11:56AM (#22794791)

Because Google optimizes for "quality content" since at least the Penguin update. They're using NLP tools to assess the writing quality (similar to algorithms telling you at what school grade level your writing is).

This was good, because it cured all the copy&pastable 2000s era "tag cloud" sites which simply dumped tons of search keywords all over the place.

Ideally, it lead to a stronger emphasis on high-quality human-written content, but it turns out that this algorithm, again, is easily fooled by feeding it "SEO essays" that looks like prose, but is irrelevant text gibberish, but written coherently.

That lead content creators to expand data that would ideally be presented in tabular form on one page, to multi-page "SEO prose" that looks like it's written for humans, but is completely undigestible.

That, along with Google's auto-suggestion feature that finish your sentences after you type in some words, especially on mobile, lead to the impression that people actually like to search in full sentences.

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Re:How SEO Ruined the Internet by gsich on Monday April 06, 2020 @07:31AM (#22792750)

They do, but the whole-sentence fraction is probably in the majority. Which leads to degraded search results and optimisation in the wrong direction.

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Re:How SEO Ruined the Internet by ivanche on Monday April 06, 2020 @07:59AM (#22792915)

One can easily make them minority by creating a script which issues keyword-only searches to Google and let it work 24/7/365 from a few hundred machines.

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Re:How SEO Ruined the Internet by gsich on Monday April 06, 2020 @08:14AM (#22793010)

No, you can't solve it that way.

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