Marco.org – Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search.
I hope to some day be able to write like Marco. His latest publication echoes my sentiments exactly.
Google has been receiving a ton of slack lately, and in my opinion it’s quite deserved. How many times within the past six months have you had to sift through the first page of Google search results, making your way through scraped content and a rabbit hole of affiliate links to finally find the resource you were looking for?
SEO has always had two sides: black hat and white hat. Affiliates and marketers have convinced Google that much of what’s black hat is no longer such because the line is so blurred. There’s surely a benefit to SEO, if there wasn’t, we wouldn’t be floating around in this massive bubble we’ve created for it.
Personally, I can’t wait for the bubble to pop.
I can’t wait for the bubble to pop and for all of us to get back to our roots and have products, services, and information speak for itself, not the marketing plan behind it. Advertising is a sneaky world, marketing is a sneaky world, I just want them to stop wasting my time.
In the meantime, I think I’ll switch search engines to see if anyone else is holding up against the junk any better.
Comments
I’ve been doing quite a bit of SEO for clients as of late. But when I do it, it’s simple. Make sure the actual content on their site uses relative language to search queries they want to so up in.
That’s it, basically. There’s no tricks, no “hats”.
For me SEO = Content Writing.
And it gets really good results.
Exactly my thoughts. It is becoming more and more difficult to find good results. If a search query is even a bit commercial related, you have to wade through tons of spammy or non-original add-filled results first before you find the real valuable content.
Google’s interests are of course also not only in line with the users (people searching), but also in line with people advertising (google adds) on their websites. So even if I as a user want to end up on a purely content based original source, for Google it’s better if I end up on a add-filled website and get to see all those shiny adds.