Metadata
- Author: Amanda Chicago Lewis
- Full Title:: Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results
- Finished date:: 2023-11-12
Highlights
I wanted to understand: what kind of human spends their days exploiting our dumbest impulses for traffic and profit? Who the hell are these people making money off of everyone else’s misery? (View Highlight)
So who ends up with a career in SEO? The stereotype is that of a hustler: a content goblin willing to eschew rules, morals, and good taste in exchange for eyeballs and mountains of cash. A nihilist in it for the thrills, a prankster gleeful about getting away with something. (View Highlight)
What Lee said he’s noticed most at SEO conferences and SEO networking events is a certain arrogance. “There’s definitely an ego among all of them,” he told me. “You succeed, and now you’re a genius. Now you’ve outdone Google.” (View Highlight)
Nowadays, he mostly invests in cannabis and psychedelics. SEO just got to be too complicated for not enough money, he told me. Ward had told me the same thing, that she had stopped focusing on SEO years ago. (View Highlight)
People doing SEO find loopholes in the algorithm; critics complain about search results; search engines innovate and close the loopholes. Rinse, repeat. (View Highlight)
the reason I found them endearing and not evil was that while many had made quite a bit of money, almost none had amassed significant power. Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke, beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm, frantically pulling levers behind the scenes but ultimately somewhat hapless. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2023-11-12
Several people that I spoke to made a similar point: the best SEOs are the ones that follow Google’s rules, which essentially ask you to make amazing websites without even thinking about Google. You are not supposed to make any attempt to artificially boost a website’s ranking; you are supposed to be designing websites for human readers, not for the algorithm (View Highlight)
Cutts openly recognized the impossible task of achieving the kind of epistemological neutrality that Google’s founders had initially promised, telling Wired at the time, “[T]he only way to be neutral is either to randomize the links or to do it alphabetically.” (View Highlight)
Out of the dozen-plus SEOs that I spoke with at length, nearly every single one insisted that search results are way better than they used to be. And except for Sullivan, these were not people with an incentive to praise Google. If anything, these were folks who lamented how much harder it had become for them to take advantage of Google. Today, they told me, search results are just objectively more accurate. More useful. More difficult to manipulate. (View Highlight)
Now, instead of wild-west crowdsourcing, search was often reinforcing institutional authority. (View Highlight)
But the sheer volume of SEO bait being produced is so massive and so complex that Google is overwhelmed. “It’s exponentially worse,” Ray said. “People can mass auto-generate content with AI and other tools,” she went on, and “in many cases, Google’s algorithms take a minute to catch onto it.” (View Highlight)
There’s a reason why most countries around the world have libraries that are public institutions: information that is controlled by a private business will always be subject to that business’s bottom line (View Highlight)