This makes me really wonder about the saturation of knowledge in SEO, the number of companies in the SEO, and the maturity of the Google "algorithm".
As I understand it, the history of SEO/Google is as such (simplistic view):
1. Google creates a search algorithm (that is not 100% known to externals) that tries to match your search term with valid, true content.
2. SEO strategists -- whether by legitimate or deceptive means -- tailor content, HTML, etc to match this algorithm.
3. Google has constantly improved and tailored this algorithm to prevent spammy type sites.
4. There is a growing consensus that spam is taking over Google search.
This all leads me to believe that either Google is losing it's touch on it's search algorithm or it's simply matured to a point that it can no longer out-game the gamers (SEOs).
Yup, Google keeps getting worse everyday. Some queries return 90% crap/spam/AI blogs and 10% useful information. Bing is not an option, DuckDuckGo it's a little better, but still... a lot of garbage. I've been noticing this since 2023, but now it's completly weird. How did spammers won the SEO battle?
The weird thing about these is that they blame Google's search results on spam. I work in SEO and I can tell you that they are much better at ignoring spam than they were in 2010, where a lot of these people quoted still have their heads at regarding SEO.
What's been going on at Google is reliance on neural nets to take care of various ranking algorithm tasks. We want better keyword matching to generate results, but Google is developing ways to match query vectors to document vectors using stuff like BERT. Google is looking at the knowledge graph of entities that emerges out of the content we write and is trying to figure out which relationships between entities are important to a query and which result set has the best coverage and diversity. This incentivizes publishers to write a lot of text that covers multiple related topics and bury the point inside of it.
The other major shift in Google is how they consider links. PageRank is still around in some form, but there could be other link-based algorithms that serve similar purposes. The last few years of core algorithm updates put a lot of importance on receiving links from news websites for any keyword with commercial intent. If you want to rank, go hard on public relations.
The result is a real loss of accuracy and a lot more false positives that are semi-related to the query.
Do the engineers at Google even know how the Google algorithm actually works? Better than SEO experts who spend there time meticulously tracking the way that the algorithm behaves under different circumstances?
My bet is that they don't. My bet is that there is so much old code, weird data edge cases and opaque machine-learning models driving the search results, Google's engineers have lost the ability to predict what the search results would be or should be in the majority of cases.
SEO experts might not have insider knowledge, but they observe in detail how the algorithm behaves, in a wide variety of circumstances, over extended periods of time. And if they say that deleting old content improves search ranking, I'm inclined to believe them over Google.
Maybe the people at Google can tell us what they want their system to do. But does it do what they want it to do anymore? My sense is that they've lost control.
I invite someone from Google to put me in my place and tell me how wrong I am about this.
Having been on the fringes of the SEO industry for many years, my theory is that the spammers and algorithm gamers have slowly but surely won out. This has forced Google to de-emphasize keyword relevancy and instead prioritize content source--large and well known brands with high domain authority have captured increasingly larger numbers of queries over the years.
Someone at Google will probably disagree emphatically, but it seems to me like this represents a bit of an existential threat to web search. There's so much money in being #1 for popular queries that countless actors will throw enormous resources into getting there.
Google has been fighting against SEO basically from the beginning. For many years, you could see the difference with other search engines that had worse tech. In general, google used to do very well against SEO bots, for well over a decade.
Today, I think they are losing. Quality primary sources are often crushed by unusable websites, which understand google's analytics very well. If I make it hard to find the information, but I make it seem that it's the next paragraph down, my search results will improve!
Google itself is causing the enshitification of third party websites, many of which have paragraphs and paragraphs that are obvious spam. I'd take any videogame guide website from 2005 over the first page of google today
It's not entirely Google's fault. SEO-oriented content is ruining the web. It's a battle I'm not sure search engines can win.
Keyword indexing and PageRank worked for a while because the underlying data wasn't written trying to game them. Then came spam linking and keyword stuffing and more. I'm surprised search engines are still useful in spite of that.
I think Google just seems to be trying their best against an army of SEO/content marketing parasites constantly trying to game their algorithm, look up a recipe website for an example of what the internet will look like if those guys win.
SEO is not dead it's just been entered by players with more money to spend for each search than this author. It's pretty irritating that so many searches on google are compromised by pseudo pages that contain shit and a link to what you are looking for. These companies mine google for searches where it's easy to get into the top 10 and then utilize their content farms to spew garbage on the net. It will be interesting to see what google can do to combat this. search results have really taken a turn for the worse in 2010.
Lots of people in this thread claiming that google is slipping, focusing on the wrong metrics, etc. But I agree, google is losing the battle against SEO and its a really hard battle to win. Eventually there will need to be a shift away from search as we know it to win this game.
Originally, Google was very effective at looking at the interconnections of content people had put online and using that to infer which pages were most relevant. SEO tactics immediately started gaming this system to create false signals of relevance, but for many years Google did an impressive job of staying ahead of that game.
I think what finally killed their search quality is the fact that there's no longer a public human-curated network of websites to draw meaning from. Most content on the web is bulk-generated crap, personal blogs and websites are rare, and many passionate hobbyist communities are hidden from crawlers in places like closed Facebook groups.
google never really recovered from SEO. once professionals started pouring money into gaming the system it stopped working.
google search results are actually terrible these days. nothing but commercial sites, ads, and a few hand picked non-commercial sources like wikipedia, stack overflow, etc.
i cant remember the last time i found an interesting new site searching on google.
SEO wars are at least part of it. Google's algorithm has evolved over time not just top optimize advertising views/clicks and take over more screen space, but also to battle the constant gamification of their algorithm by SEO that, once you eventually get to the real results, will surface less relevant/spammy/scammy etc results if Google doesn't constantly push back against the worst SEO abusers.
One thing that's worrying me that isn't covered here: a lot of this low-quality SEO content is constantly regurgitated to produce... low-quality SEO content. Content farmers use content from Google results to write content for Google results. Google is getting devoured by loops like this.
I'm not a native English speaker, so at one point I was trying to find an authoritative source for an old idiom... and the entire first page were all different websites regurgitating the same inaccurate text! They did no independent verification of their own.
Yeah, that's one of the main issues. And it's about to get worse with the newer generative models.
I don't think Google ever had a great algorithm and switched to something worse. It's just the SEO actors putting crap out there now, and clickbait. The thing it became worse at was recommending small sites/blogs over big publications/sites.
Back in the day, all they had to face was people trying to spread viruses but those results were super obvious. And they weren't even flagged back then, just users were smart enough to instantly spot it from the result.
Google is almost useless since a few years now. Generative AI might have made it worse, and more obvious, but Google not going anything about aggressive SEO practices was already the beginning of the end.
As I understand it, the history of SEO/Google is as such (simplistic view):
1. Google creates a search algorithm (that is not 100% known to externals) that tries to match your search term with valid, true content.
2. SEO strategists -- whether by legitimate or deceptive means -- tailor content, HTML, etc to match this algorithm.
3. Google has constantly improved and tailored this algorithm to prevent spammy type sites.
4. There is a growing consensus that spam is taking over Google search.
This all leads me to believe that either Google is losing it's touch on it's search algorithm or it's simply matured to a point that it can no longer out-game the gamers (SEOs).
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