<story><title>Search engines and SEO spam</title><url>https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1477760548787920901</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nkrisc</author><text>I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all.&lt;p&gt;Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.</text></item><item><author>ufo</author><text>There aren&amp;#x27;t as many blogs now as there used to be.</text></item><item><author>wodenokoto</author><text>Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I&amp;#x27;m reading a restaurant review site, and they won&amp;#x27;t link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.</text></item><item><author>frenchyatwork</author><text>I think one of the fundamental things that make search work well about 1-2 decades ago was that web sites would link to each other, and that those links could vaguely correlate with reputation. There were link spammers, but there was actually a some decent organic content as well.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s happened since then is that almost all the normal &amp;quot;people linking to things they like&amp;quot; has gone behind walled gardens (chiefly Facebook), and vast majority of what remains on the open web are SEO spammers.</text></item><item><author>jrockway</author><text>To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn&amp;#x27;t any data worth returning.  Yesterday&amp;#x27;s thread talked a lot about reviews.  Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing.  If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn&amp;#x27;t anything to find.  Instead you&amp;#x27;ll get a list of &amp;quot;Best TVs 2021&amp;quot; or whatever, with some blurb and an affiliate link, not an actual review.  That&amp;#x27;s what people can make for free with a day&amp;#x27;s notice, so if you write a search engine that discards those sites, that&amp;#x27;s fine, you&amp;#x27;ll just return &amp;quot;no results&amp;quot; for every interesting query.&lt;p&gt;I guess what I&amp;#x27;m saying is that if you want better reviews, you probably want to start writing reviews and figuring out how to sell them for money.  Many have tried, few have succeeded.  But there probably isn&amp;#x27;t some Javascript that will fix this problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Baeocystin</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d believe it. As an IT consultant, I interact with a lot of people who are semi-techs themselves- mostly small business owners who are used to wearing a lot of hats, and also the type to have been motivated to run their own personal blogs about diving&amp;#x2F;photography&amp;#x2F;conlangs&amp;#x2F;quilting&amp;#x2F;gardening&amp;#x2F;whatever their personal hobbies are.&lt;p&gt;Ten years ago, the majority(!) had at least something up and running, where they would post essays, thoughts, whatever came to mind.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays? All gone. All! When asked why, the answer almost always is along a mix of ever-increasing negative feedback and harassment from randos, and aggressive automated spamming of their forums. Loss of the pseudo-anonymity plays a large role as well. Many have deleted years&amp;#x27; worth of work, simply because they are afraid of someone trolling through their posts to find something to harass them with.&lt;p&gt;I was never a blogger myself, but I am sad about the change. There was a lot of good stuff out there for a while, and sometimes it just plain made me happy to read someone joyfully nerding out on a favorite subject of theirs.</text></comment>
<story><title>Search engines and SEO spam</title><url>https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1477760548787920901</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nkrisc</author><text>I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all.&lt;p&gt;Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.</text></item><item><author>ufo</author><text>There aren&amp;#x27;t as many blogs now as there used to be.</text></item><item><author>wodenokoto</author><text>Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I&amp;#x27;m reading a restaurant review site, and they won&amp;#x27;t link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.</text></item><item><author>frenchyatwork</author><text>I think one of the fundamental things that make search work well about 1-2 decades ago was that web sites would link to each other, and that those links could vaguely correlate with reputation. There were link spammers, but there was actually a some decent organic content as well.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s happened since then is that almost all the normal &amp;quot;people linking to things they like&amp;quot; has gone behind walled gardens (chiefly Facebook), and vast majority of what remains on the open web are SEO spammers.</text></item><item><author>jrockway</author><text>To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn&amp;#x27;t any data worth returning.  Yesterday&amp;#x27;s thread talked a lot about reviews.  Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing.  If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn&amp;#x27;t anything to find.  Instead you&amp;#x27;ll get a list of &amp;quot;Best TVs 2021&amp;quot; or whatever, with some blurb and an affiliate link, not an actual review.  That&amp;#x27;s what people can make for free with a day&amp;#x27;s notice, so if you write a search engine that discards those sites, that&amp;#x27;s fine, you&amp;#x27;ll just return &amp;quot;no results&amp;quot; for every interesting query.&lt;p&gt;I guess what I&amp;#x27;m saying is that if you want better reviews, you probably want to start writing reviews and figuring out how to sell them for money.  Many have tried, few have succeeded.  But there probably isn&amp;#x27;t some Javascript that will fix this problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kritiko</author><text>I frequently append site:reddit.com to searches for a niche search term these days. I think a lot of people who would have blogged or commented on blogs are posting there instead.</text></comment>