I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance.

Right now SEO it's an arms race between google and every SEO agencies, with a keyword being attached to some company that may have 0 relevance to the user.

Doesn't help, that depending on the query, the first results are ads only superficially related. You can search for the name of a popular brand of a car/hotel/insurance, and the first results are the competitors. If you don't want to be below the fold, you need to pay, even if your website it's exactly what the user it's looking for.

> I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance.

It was never the case. As soon as google started to be popular, people were hired to manipulate its search results. "Natural" SEO was never a thing. You always had to use shady tactics in order to get a good ranking because everybody was doing the same.

Even before Google, people would stuff the bottom of their page with black on black keyword stuffing to game Altavista

This exactly. Google was an almost overnight success because in the beginning it gave much more useful results than Altavista and others even when they had indexed a small fraction of what Altavista had.

The internet grew up. I want to hate Google as much as the next guy but it is not their fault that money has corrupted it.

In that sense Google's monopoly is actually preferable for marketeers. It would be a lot harder to manipulate search engine results if the public was split among 20 of them.

That would not help. Those kind of effects are inherent in the system. As long as Visitsv lead to any kind of revenue, no matter if by Ad Impressions or Affiliate Programms or whatever, there exists a motivation and people will try to drag visitors to their sites. You will have to remove eCommerce from the Internet to fix that.

Search isn’t Google’s moneymaker, advertising is. And those shitty SEO’d sites are choc-a-bloc with advertising. Google has little incentive to downrank them.

Google can trivially reduce the amount of spam by using the amount of ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc as a negative ranking signal.

Instead of targeting SEO per-se (as it's difficult to determine a good website with SEO vs a spam website with SEO), target how they're making money.

They're not doing so exactly because they have no incentive.

What incentives do they have to promote affiliate links to Amazon ?

It's a bit more complicated than that. Even useful sites in commercially related niches use affiliate links as a source of revenue.

I’m not saying they promote them explicitly. I’m arguing that they should downrank them because it’s a likely indicator of spam - there’s a lot of spam websites out there which are just bullshit listicles or fake review websites whose primary objective is to get you to buy through their affiliated link. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s software out there that can churn out and update these websites automatically. Google has no incentive to downrank these though because those spam websites also often contain Google analytics or ads.

Search is their main gateway to the advertising dollars. "Google it" is synonymous with any search regardless of the engine being used.

Wouldn’t in-app advertisement be at least on par, probably higher in usage ?

They serve ads regardless how you get to the site you’re viewing.

They serve more ads if they steer you towards the low value SEO website filled with Adsense.

That is precisely my original point.

Google loses if people stop using it. Google has every incentive to downrank them.

Google has incentives to degrade the quality of search results for the benefit of its profitability, up to the extent that is able to without turning away too many users.

I think it's more like that rather than an either/or.

They have competition: if we get to the point where Bing/DuckDuckGo results are clearly better, people will start moving, and that will hurt their revenue badly.

Yes and those results don’t have to be just better. They have to be clearly better as you stated. The likliehood of that happening any time soon is close to zero.

I personally use Bing for 95% of my searches and have done so since it launched. Or re-launched.

I switched precisely because I found that the DuckDuckGo results were indeed better. This was a third attempt though - the first two times it wasn't quite good enough. It improved, and Google got worse.

This makes no sense. Google makes more money when users click on some crappy landing page filled with display ads?

The web has - as it inevitably would - adapted to being searched by Google.

This makes it much harder to be a good search engine.

I have no idea how to quantify how much the decline is because of that.

While true, this isn’t actually a complicated issue to solve: humans and a heavy hand. Get humans to review everything on page one of every search. Get caught massaging your site? Permanent ban.

Google refuses to hire humans to do stuff like this. Their service is terrible. Maps requires free labour of millions of users to get information updated.

The author included with this “blog post” about their browser extension.