There was/is whitehat SEO: properly creating links to relevant content within a site, using keywords that help bots find relevant content, traversing your own site to make sure there aren't dead zones with content that will never be found.
Google should have leaned into just this small segment of tooling and done much more of a ban hammer on the bad actors. They didn't and a bunch of people have left. I use DuckDuckGo mostly and sometimes Google but never by default. I don't even like DDG that much but it's good enough.
Re:Google Search's Death by a Thousand Cuts
by eastbound on Monday July 03, 2023 @06:20AM
(#36570986)
SEO sends the message that you have a content writer, and, thus, that you are a well established business (The content that is required to be produced is more nefarious than having hamster marketing guys spin in wheels, but the nature of the work is irrelevant to Google).
> web rings and link indexes
The popular "Awesome ${whatever}" collections are very much that, link indexes for relatively narrow areas.
Curation matters. This is something computers are still bad at, or are too expensive to deploy for a mass-market service.
Re:Google Search's Death by a Thousand Cuts
by anotheruser13 on Monday July 03, 2023 @05:54PM
(#36579307)
In general, listicles suck. (Business) Insider is a good example of this.
[1] https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html