<story><title>A glitch in the SEO matrix</title><url>https://www.izzy.co/blogs/a-glitch-in-the-seo-matrix.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codegeek</author><text>You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool&amp;#x2F;software etc because everyone has gamed the &amp;quot;Best software for xyz&amp;quot; etc. But what&amp;#x27;s the alternative ? None. There are these &amp;quot;review&amp;quot; websites like Capterra&amp;#x2F;Software Advice&amp;#x2F;G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT if you want to be shown on the main page for that category, you need to pay crazy PPC.&lt;p&gt;Source: I play this game since I run a software business. Would love an alternative but there are none. You either Play the game or you Die.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samwillis</author><text>From the point of view of someone who spent 10 years running an e-commerce store, and all its advertising, until a couple of years ago. Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead. The hay day of being able to play the game and make a tidy profit is long gone.&lt;p&gt;Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own profits. Google&amp;#x27;s visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. People complain about the tracking of users&amp;#x2F;visitors, but the tracking of businesses is just as bad.&lt;p&gt;They probably have better insights into the economy and market trends than most governments and banks.&lt;p&gt;The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term expectation of Google&amp;#x27;s business are not what they were.</text></comment>
<story><title>A glitch in the SEO matrix</title><url>https://www.izzy.co/blogs/a-glitch-in-the-seo-matrix.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codegeek</author><text>You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool&amp;#x2F;software etc because everyone has gamed the &amp;quot;Best software for xyz&amp;quot; etc. But what&amp;#x27;s the alternative ? None. There are these &amp;quot;review&amp;quot; websites like Capterra&amp;#x2F;Software Advice&amp;#x2F;G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT if you want to be shown on the main page for that category, you need to pay crazy PPC.&lt;p&gt;Source: I play this game since I run a software business. Would love an alternative but there are none. You either Play the game or you Die.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the8472</author><text>&amp;gt; But what&amp;#x27;s the alternative ?&lt;p&gt;Since ads are a red queen&amp;#x27;s race, wasting people&amp;#x27;s attention and assuming we don&amp;#x27;t want to outright ban them then the next best alternative is to tax them heavily.
How about 0.00001 cent per pixel-second-view?&lt;p&gt;Then people will only put up ads when there&amp;#x27;s some real value in it, not just to keep up with the competition.</text></comment>