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A comment on If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?. Parent comment

Re:If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? by throw_m239339 on Saturday March 19, 2022 @04:55AM (#30732263)
> 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.

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Re:If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? by kalleboo on Saturday March 19, 2022 @05:54AM (#30732494)
Even before Google, people would stuff the bottom of their page with black on black keyword stuffing to game Altavista
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Re:If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? by oriolid on Saturday March 19, 2022 @10:31AM (#30734010)
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.
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Re:If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? by MomoXenosaga on Saturday March 19, 2022 @07:33AM (#30732969)
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.

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