I've worked in online search since the late 1990s. I've been writing since 1972. The crap that SEO tactics has done to online writing, and the violation of our attention spans by digital marketing and ads has just been a nightmare. What could have been fantastic - a real internet with real information - devolved quickly. Not that I'm a fan of those AI overviews, but honestly... think of the countless hours the human race has wasted (and we'll never get back) trying to find the information we were looking for, buried behind all the ads, and stashed down at the bottom of pages filled with keyword-rich backstory that has nothing to do with what we were looking for. Frankly, I'm surprised more people aren't apoplectic about the effect of digital marketing on writing and information delivery. It's been a phenomenal waste of life force.
So true. Though I do feel like it’s a chicken and egg situation: the SEO spam prevailed because Google has never truly understood the signals of good content.
I think they knew it, but they didn't have the technical chops to support it. For years, they were telling people to write for people, not for the algorithm, but people still did that abysmal "SEO writing" crap... and then as Google was able to become "more human" in its rankings, people lost traction because they'd been keyword stuffing and putting text in white on white. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the 2000s! Google kept telling people to quit gaming the system... but no... I think one of the issues is that they just couldn't make a decent business case out of just showing people decent search results. Of course, it doesn't help that everybody wants something for free. Especially if it's online.
Well, it was rather ridiculous to emphasize schema markup then tell people to write for humans — which I only recall them beginning to emphasize in 2023 when Danny tried explaining HCU to affected sites.
Penguin was intended to wipe out the SEO spam but went too far, which is why they essentially rolled it back. Most of the other core updates moved in the right direction. But when they shifted to almost exclusively ML in the algorithm, and let it write the entire HCU so no human can even unravel it, that’s when it felt like things shifted for the worse.
They’ve been going downhill since, and introducing AIOs and now AI Mode is making the errors stand out even more. Interesting to see how power users and normies both have stopped trusting Google search.
I’m thinking of everything prior to schema. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I recall a number of impassioned pleas from Google SEO leads to the rest of the world, begging us to just write for people, instead of trying to game the system. They did this fairly regularly for a number of years. Simpler times.
I absolutely agree we need to interrogate the information we encounter. That’s always been the case — but we’ve grown lazier about it, even before AI came along.
Take, for instance, the reaction to the notion of machine learning. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing: it’s a way for algorithms to improve themselves and do better at their tasks.
Even the Substack feed involves an algorithm that teaches itself. It shows you what it thinks you’ll like. If you interact it learns to show you more of the same.
agree. As a marketer, I learned how to determine consumer or target market relevanc: back in the it was about RFM - Recency, Frequency and Monetization — same principles that hold true today. That’s how our feeds get populated but the more data we have on behaviour the more platforms manipulate to their own ends.
I've worked in online search since the late 1990s. I've been writing since 1972. The crap that SEO tactics has done to online writing, and the violation of our attention spans by digital marketing and ads has just been a nightmare. What could have been fantastic - a real internet with real information - devolved quickly. Not that I'm a fan of those AI overviews, but honestly... think of the countless hours the human race has wasted (and we'll never get back) trying to find the information we were looking for, buried behind all the ads, and stashed down at the bottom of pages filled with keyword-rich backstory that has nothing to do with what we were looking for. Frankly, I'm surprised more people aren't apoplectic about the effect of digital marketing on writing and information delivery. It's been a phenomenal waste of life force.
So true. Though I do feel like it’s a chicken and egg situation: the SEO spam prevailed because Google has never truly understood the signals of good content.
I think they knew it, but they didn't have the technical chops to support it. For years, they were telling people to write for people, not for the algorithm, but people still did that abysmal "SEO writing" crap... and then as Google was able to become "more human" in its rankings, people lost traction because they'd been keyword stuffing and putting text in white on white. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the 2000s! Google kept telling people to quit gaming the system... but no... I think one of the issues is that they just couldn't make a decent business case out of just showing people decent search results. Of course, it doesn't help that everybody wants something for free. Especially if it's online.
Well, it was rather ridiculous to emphasize schema markup then tell people to write for humans — which I only recall them beginning to emphasize in 2023 when Danny tried explaining HCU to affected sites.
Penguin was intended to wipe out the SEO spam but went too far, which is why they essentially rolled it back. Most of the other core updates moved in the right direction. But when they shifted to almost exclusively ML in the algorithm, and let it write the entire HCU so no human can even unravel it, that’s when it felt like things shifted for the worse.
They’ve been going downhill since, and introducing AIOs and now AI Mode is making the errors stand out even more. Interesting to see how power users and normies both have stopped trusting Google search.
I’m thinking of everything prior to schema. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I recall a number of impassioned pleas from Google SEO leads to the rest of the world, begging us to just write for people, instead of trying to game the system. They did this fairly regularly for a number of years. Simpler times.
I just read this and the incestuous nature of a system learning from itself creates this model collapse as the masses on board.
I fear that humans will become complacent, and not interrogate information they encounter.
We need literacy to help us distinguish reality from fiction. It is not too late.
https://futurism.com/chatgpt-polluted-ruined-ai-development
I absolutely agree we need to interrogate the information we encounter. That’s always been the case — but we’ve grown lazier about it, even before AI came along.
Take, for instance, the reaction to the notion of machine learning. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing: it’s a way for algorithms to improve themselves and do better at their tasks.
Even the Substack feed involves an algorithm that teaches itself. It shows you what it thinks you’ll like. If you interact it learns to show you more of the same.
agree. As a marketer, I learned how to determine consumer or target market relevanc: back in the it was about RFM - Recency, Frequency and Monetization — same principles that hold true today. That’s how our feeds get populated but the more data we have on behaviour the more platforms manipulate to their own ends.