Every time I complain about people making and presenting their content in terrible ways just to get better traffic, I get some reply sticking up for them:
“Look, if they don’t write for machines, nobody will see their work!”
If their work is terrible because you wrote it for a machine, nobody needs to see their work.
#AI#Search#Google#SearchEngines#SEO: "AI Overviews are just one of a slew of dramatic changes Google has made to its core product over the past two years. The company says its recent effort to revamp Search will usher in an exciting new era of technology and help solve many of the issues plaguing the web. But critics say the opposite may be true. As Google retools its algorithms and uses AI to transition from a search engine to a search and answer engine, some worry the result could be no less than an extinction-level event for the businesses that make much of your favourite content.
One thing is certain: Google's work is about to have a profound impact on what many of us see when we go online.
Over the last two years, updates meant to make Search more “helpful” devastated many website owners who say they follow Google’s best practices. (Source: Semrush) (Credit: BBC)
Over the last two years, updates meant to make Search more “helpful” devastated many website owners who say they follow Google’s best practices. (Source: Semrush) (Credit: BBC)
The changes came about because Google recognises the web has a problem. You've seen it yourself, if you've ever used a search engine. The Internet is dominated by a school of website building known as "search engine optimisation", or SEO, techniques that are meant to tune articles and web pages for better recognition from Google Search. Google even provides SEO tips, tools and advice for website owners. For millions of businesses that rely on the mechanisations of the Search machine, SEO can be an unavoidable game.
I'm not going to quote or link to the post, but I just left this comment. I'll add something to it at the end.
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You're not going to learn what the search algorithms are doing from the API documentation. You're not going to learn what the ranking signals are from the API documentation. That's a fairy tale cooked up by people who obviously don't understand just how ubiquitous APIs have become in the development world. They are used to move data between clients and files (usually both ways where protocol buffers are concerned).
You got some interesting names and acronyms from the APIs. That's cool and fun to play with. But no one learned anything about how Google collects and processes this data, or where the data was used, when it was used, what they hoped to accomplish from using it, or what the results were.
All this "algorithm" stuff is just nonsense and you will lead a much improved life if you just walk away from these fairy tales before you do something really stupid with a Website people's livelihoods depend on.
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The people who think the API documents have spilled the guts of Google's algorithm and proven that Googlers have been lying to you for years created a clown show that - for now - simply embarrasses the entire search engine optimization world.
It's when the new tools and tool features start rolling out, and when the new "SEO secrets to success" courses that incorporate the nonsense the SEO community have been telling each other, that the real damage will be done.
Frankly, I don't care if you people nuke your own Websites with this stupidity. If you insist on being THAT gullible you deserve to waste your time, energy, and money on ridiculous fairy tale optimization.
But those of you who are selling your services or doing full-time work as in-house SEOs - these aren't just YOUR livelihoods you're risking on your fantasies and bullshit misinterpretations. You're putting OTHER people's livelihoods at risk.
The SEO community has done this before. You guys just latch on to some get-traffic-quick scheme and roll with it until the crap in the search results becomes so intolerable the search engines are forced to take drastic action. That's happened time and again since Black Monday in 1998.
Obviously most of you are never going to learn to check your dreams and egos at the door. You're going to continue cooking up nonsense theories and backslapping each other over your ridiculous guesses at how large software systems work.
Your magical thinking makes you feel good but I look back at all the times small businesses - and sometimes big enterprises - had to scramble to uncook the disasters created by SEO specialists who followed a "theory" or accepted as verified fact some nonsense that clearly contradicted what the search engineers told us.
Learn from this - not what you wish for - but what you need to learn. Do better.
Schema.org markup, Open Graph meta-data and XML sitemaps are important for the performance of a website on search engines and social media.
It is easy to install some large plugin like Yoast SEO to do this, while also loading your site with a million other functions that you might or might not want.
@jfroehlich@randfish
Usually there is a Google core rollout while I'm at Brighton SEO - though these days they are so frequent it would be hard no to coincide! Hopefully you are relaxed from time at the lake - because there is a lot of reading to do!!
@ilovechoclates_
Some might indeed say betrayal but this is corporate and thier morals are driven by different drivers than individuals. i worry that the Google Search front line team are going to suffer. Not really thier decision to explain things how they have.
@simoncox Yeah, you're right. As far as I know about businesses, they're driven by revenue. The whole Google ads email leak stuff was fascinating to me.
@jeromechoo how would this juvenile with people claiming lately that there’s been a radical shift in the algorithm that’s destroying small online businesses that are now getting bypassed in favor of content farms?
Has anyone found any good summaries of what the recent...kerfuffle around Google's AI bullshit (not to let my feelings show or anything) means for things like SEO strategy, content marketing, etc?
I'm working on some ideas for my own articles to aid with my current job hunt so any and all recommendations, thoughts, comments, and excoriations are truly appreciated!
Someone said they would never hire fat people, explaining that overweight people could not be trusted because if they lost the most precious thing in life - their body, their health - how could you trust them not to ruin the business they were hired to do?
While I don't endorse this opinion, I have to admit that it has been on my mind for about a year now.
I mean, I've been thinking about my body and my health.
Besides the fact that I run and lift weights (amateur style) 6 days a week, I continue to maintain my dad bod.
But my wife says I'm not fat.
Anyway, I wanted to ask all the ~50 and over people who spend half their lives staring at screens and don't have the genetics most of us would kill for:
How do you take care of your body and your health?