I find it interesting how people have to change their website content so Google will notice them and give them preferential treatment. Like those cooking websites where they have to tell their life story before giving the recipe.
Google is responsible for the bloat on the website, but also just stealing their content in the summary.
That’s not entirely Google’s fault. SEO people have been assaulting Google’s algorithms for decades. Their unrelenting attempts to game the results for their own profit ruined the internet for everyone. They are the ones who produced bloat in unfathomable quantities to manipulate search results in their favor. Those cooking websites are just the casualties of the never-ending war between aggressive marketing departments and search engine algorithms. It’s easy to blame Google because they’re generally shit, but they’re not really the only guilty party here, perhaps not even the most.
They do, but there’s no magical button that they can press to cleanse the internet from marketing bloat or even prevent it from polluting the internet. Whatever they do, there will always be people actively trying to game Google’s attempts to present useful search results for the user. There will always be very well funded marketing departments working full time trying to manipulate any search algorithm, any ranking method imaginable that Google might employ. And they can never be stopped, only managed. A battle that can’t be won, only fought. It’s an impossible task, and despite my burning hatred for Google I still think it’s a miracle that their search results are as useful as they are, given the truly incomprehensibly enormous amount of spam that’s out there.
I understand your sympathy for google (cool album name, btw), but the problem I have with sympathizing with them is: what is their motivation? They already have a monopoly and they make more money if you click on an ad. In fact, if the number one search result is consistently good, you’re much more likely to skip the ads every time. Therefore, Google’s financial incentive is to make search just good enough that you don´t go to a competitor in disgust.
I’m not being cynical, either. There have been various people representing the old guard at Google who’ve come out and said the mission of the company is ever expanding profit at the expense of usability.
Google isn’t a victim in this. Their “attempts to present useful search results for the user” are financially based. Google wants people to pay for the right to be higher in the results, not game the system.
Theres literally buttons for all of that and they are owned by Google. The world’s biggest ad company does have something to with the amount of marketing bloat, believe it or not.
We had SEO before Google. We’ll have SEO after Google.
Yesterday it was a website with 47 different kinds of pop-up ads that contained every conceivable recipe in the meta-data of the header. Today it’s a 12,000 word Martha Stewart rant about the time mom cooked a croquet madame before a two sentence recipe instruction. Tomorrow… who knows?
Maybe we’ll only get recipes read to us during the performance of an elaborate TikTok dance. Maybe we’ll need a thumbprint, a live camera photo, and three forms of state-issued ID to prove our identity before we can access FaceBook Presents: The One Cookbook Still Legally Allowed To Be Hosted On The Internet. Maybe everything will need to be translated from Chinese.
Point being that the SEO was forced onto the websites to make their websites a worse experience. Now they summarize the website so you don’t have to view that website anymore.
and that’s before we get to AMP, where google will 1) outright refuse to show pages that don’t follow their guidelines, and 2) just copy the content from those pages to display themselves because the guidelines are designed to make the copying easier for them.
I find it interesting how people have to change their website content so Google will notice them and give them preferential treatment. Like those cooking websites where they have to tell their life story before giving the recipe.
Google is responsible for the bloat on the website, but also just stealing their content in the summary.
That’s not entirely Google’s fault. SEO people have been assaulting Google’s algorithms for decades. Their unrelenting attempts to game the results for their own profit ruined the internet for everyone. They are the ones who produced bloat in unfathomable quantities to manipulate search results in their favor. Those cooking websites are just the casualties of the never-ending war between aggressive marketing departments and search engine algorithms. It’s easy to blame Google because they’re generally shit, but they’re not really the only guilty party here, perhaps not even the most.
You’re not wrong that it’s a lot of people, but Google controls their own algorithms.
They do, but there’s no magical button that they can press to cleanse the internet from marketing bloat or even prevent it from polluting the internet. Whatever they do, there will always be people actively trying to game Google’s attempts to present useful search results for the user. There will always be very well funded marketing departments working full time trying to manipulate any search algorithm, any ranking method imaginable that Google might employ. And they can never be stopped, only managed. A battle that can’t be won, only fought. It’s an impossible task, and despite my burning hatred for Google I still think it’s a miracle that their search results are as useful as they are, given the truly incomprehensibly enormous amount of spam that’s out there.
I understand your sympathy for google (cool album name, btw), but the problem I have with sympathizing with them is: what is their motivation? They already have a monopoly and they make more money if you click on an ad. In fact, if the number one search result is consistently good, you’re much more likely to skip the ads every time. Therefore, Google’s financial incentive is to make search just good enough that you don´t go to a competitor in disgust.
I’m not being cynical, either. There have been various people representing the old guard at Google who’ve come out and said the mission of the company is ever expanding profit at the expense of usability.
Google isn’t a victim in this. Their “attempts to present useful search results for the user” are financially based. Google wants people to pay for the right to be higher in the results, not game the system.
Theres literally buttons for all of that and they are owned by Google. The world’s biggest ad company does have something to with the amount of marketing bloat, believe it or not.
I don’t know, Google controls the board and all the rules. The SEO people are just the players trying to play by those rules.
We had SEO before Google. We’ll have SEO after Google.
Yesterday it was a website with 47 different kinds of pop-up ads that contained every conceivable recipe in the meta-data of the header. Today it’s a 12,000 word Martha Stewart rant about the time mom cooked a croquet madame before a two sentence recipe instruction. Tomorrow… who knows?
Maybe we’ll only get recipes read to us during the performance of an elaborate TikTok dance. Maybe we’ll need a thumbprint, a live camera photo, and three forms of state-issued ID to prove our identity before we can access FaceBook Presents: The One Cookbook Still Legally Allowed To Be Hosted On The Internet. Maybe everything will need to be translated from Chinese.
Only time will tell.
Point being that the SEO was forced onto the websites to make their websites a worse experience. Now they summarize the website so you don’t have to view that website anymore.
and that’s before we get to AMP, where google will 1) outright refuse to show pages that don’t follow their guidelines, and 2) just copy the content from those pages to display themselves because the guidelines are designed to make the copying easier for them.