ajsadauskas, (edited ) to tech
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

And for a time, it worked.

But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

@degoogle

ScriptFanix, to web French
@ScriptFanix@maly.io avatar

#jeChercheUnJob (pas moi, ma chérie) de #rédacteur #web / #SEO en #indépendant #freelance, payé au mot. Me contacter en DM pour une mise en relation

Le boost sauve des couples

mariyadelano, (edited ) to mastodon
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io avatar

Hello #Mastodon and the #Fediverse.

I want to tell you a story about how I, a marketer with a small social media following, accidentally blew up Mastodon with some war reporting.

And then I will show you what that experience, together with some recent developments on other social networks, can tell us about this weird moment we’re living through and what the internet might look like on the other side of it.

https://www.admdnewsletter.com/p/on-the-birth-of-a-new-internet

#marketing #content #SEO #socialMedia

mariyadelano, to SEO
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io avatar

The Verge asked “who ruined the internet”, and pinned the blame on SEOs.

I don't blame the Verge for falling into this trap. When they see us (SEOs), they see the people who work in explicitly helping businesses make money online. And they see our role in commercializing the web all too clearly, while missing the other parties who may have also played a part.

But why are we looking for anyone else to blame?

Read here: https://searchengineland.com/un-ruin-internet-ultimate-guide-seo-434764

syn, to nonbinary

#introduction post! New nerd on the block, #nonbinary, they/them. Likes #opensource stuff, believes in using #SEO for evil, and mostly just wants to read good #scifi all the time... Just finished re-reading #Watchmen.

Will post re: books, tech, political rants, and whatever else is on my head... then might get overwhelmed and disappear for a while, lurking in the background for a while before coming back with a vendetta against myself.

Nice to meet y'all new friends!

tdp_org, to SEO
@tdp_org@mastodon.social avatar

We recently noticed a fair bit of traffic on www.bbc.co.uk & www.bbc.com from a User Agent which identifies itself as "ByteSpider" (& has a @bytedance.com email address).

Lots of docs on the web state it doesn't obey robots.txt but ByteDance have told us it does:

> ...in the robots.txt files
> user-agent:Bytespider
> Disallow:/

Thought that might be worth documenting as it might be a recent change & several of us searched but found zero docs from ByteDance

jsrailton, to random
@jsrailton@mastodon.social avatar

NEW: I found 1000s of shady PDFs hosted on .gov websites of states, universities, defense contractors, etc.

It was a clever SEO spam operation, but the access could have been exploited for more nefarious things. 1/

@lorenzofb has the writeup

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/02/scammers-publish-ads-for-hacking-services-on-government-websites/

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Between Innovation and Disinformation - An Analysis of the Market for Books Generated by Artificial Intelligence (dadalo.pl) Polish

@deep: In this article, I address the topic of content generation by artificial intelligence and its impact on the publishing market and, more broadly, on the quality of information available to readers. I present concerns about the quality and authenticity of AI-generated content in the context of disinformation and potential...

gomez, to SEO

Hi! Are you a freelance SEO expert?
I'm seeking someone to audit and suggest improvements for my business website (WordPress).
If you have the skills and experience, please contact me.
I'm in UK but location not important.
Don't have a huge budget but there is one!
Let's discuss further.

Please boost for reach.

#seo #marketing #AskFedi

ernie, to SEO
@ernie@writing.exchange avatar

You knew it was coming, so here it is: My long rant about how awful #CNET’s culling of its archive for #SEO reasons is.

Here’s a dirty little secret, though: A lot of sites do and have done similar things, and we don’t talk about those. We probably should!

https://tedium.co/2023/08/11/content-pruning-news-websites-is-stupid/

new @tedium

ajkohn, to SEO

It's Goog Enough!

"Any user interaction data from a system this broken will become increasingly unreliable. So it's no surprise we're seeing a simulacrum of content, a landscape full of mediocre content that might seem tasty but isn't nutritional."

https://www.blindfiveyearold.com/its-goog-enough

#SEO #Google #Search

badams, to SEO

If you read just one article explaining how Large Language Models work, make it this one - it’s excellent:

https://www.understandingai.org/p/large-language-models-explained-with

H/T @chrismoranuk

#seo #llm #ai #chatgpt

csswizardry, to SEO

🚀 More than you ever wanted to know—and more!—about Core Web Vitals and SEO: https://csswz.it/cwv4seo

MikeBlazer, to SEO
@MikeBlazer@mastodon.social avatar

As another wave of #SEO #Twitter refugees hits Mastodon, here's the list of federated SEOs on #Mastodon from @jon

https://coywolf.com/federated-seos/

Find and follow your fellow SEOs or meet new ones.

🚀 Boost this post for more reach.

mullaney, to SEO

Let's talk about . Yesterday, I produced some examples of alt-text. It was pointed out that the alt text I was using was quite verbose.

After googling around, I found several recommendations for keeping alt-text to something like 125-160 characters.

To me, that feels like a good recommendation for , but not necessarily a good recommendation for .

What do you think?

Please boost this, I'd love to get some responses from people who use

syntaxseed, to SEO
@syntaxseed@phpc.social avatar

I'm convinced people keep so many #browser tabs open because bookmarking sucks.

It always just sticks it in your last used folder (or the root folder) so you have to edit it right away to put it in the right place.

You have to edit out all the #SEO crap that sites put into the title tag to get a sane bookmark name.

Opening bookmarks is rarely quick unless you've really optimized the organization.

You get a lot of bookmark rot of things you've forgotten why you saved, or page doesn't exist. 👎

samsteiner, (edited ) to SEO German
@samsteiner@swiss.social avatar

Erste Schritte - Quick Wins für mehr Sichtbarkeit in Google.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2z-2IQoQq8 24min Basis-Schulung zu Search Console, das oft innert Tagen eine Steigerung bringt. #SEO

leonid, to SEO German
@leonid@norden.social avatar

Optimising your content for search engines degrades it for people.

#seo #google

ericheiken, to SEO

In case anybody is wondering, Google Search Console does not accept lastmod dates in XML sitemaps before 1970.

#seo

monospace, to SEO
@monospace@floss.social avatar

You don't need a CDN! With Varnish, the open source cache proxy, you can shield your website from traffic spikes and speed up its content delivery by orders of magnitude. In my Varnish Master Course, you'll learn everything you need to set it up and configure it for optimal performance. https://www.monospacementor.com/courses/varnish-master-course/
#VarnishCache #SEO #WebPerformance #Course #Drupal #WordPress #WebDevelopment

sos, to twitter
@sos@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Exactly the same content, posted on the same time, to similar crowd, gets 10x more engagement here than on Twitter, even tho I have 10x less followers here.

Why are people still using Twitter for promotion? And some are paying money thinking they're getting a good deal.

#twitter #mastodon #socialmedia #seo #visibility #posting #content #followers #viral #gamedev #indiedev

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ricmac, to ai
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Search engines are morphing into generative AI chatbots, and websites are facing a referral traffic drought. I spoke with Jim Yu from SEO company BrightEdge about what website operators and publishers can do as AI-based search products like Perplexity and Google SGE begin to take over the web. https://thenewstack.io/as-search-engines-become-ai-chatbots-what-can-publishers-do/ #AI #search #SEO

maxleibman, to SEO
@maxleibman@mastodon.social avatar

"But SEO is just giving people what they want!"

False.

Patient zero: if I search the web for a phone number, what I want is to know whose phone number it is.

The top results should be pages that contain that phone number and information about what person or business it belongs to (including, if it's a business, their own web site).

What I don't want—what NOBODY wants—are spammy, scammy, for-pay reverse phone lookup companies.

#SearchIsDead #enshittification #SEO

maxleibman,
@maxleibman@mastodon.social avatar
  1. Find information that already exists for free (or that is extremely cheap to get)*.

  2. Either put it behind a paywall or wrap it in ads until it is virtually unusable (or both).

  3. Find a way to increase the search ranking of your version.

This is not a business model, this is ruining the web for money.

  • ~ Also, some aren't even doing this (e.g., like a reverse phone lookup service that PRETENDS to have data it doesn't).

#SearchIsDead #enshittification #SEO

maxleibman,
@maxleibman@mastodon.social avatar

Me in 2000: Google is the new Alta Vista! [in that it has become my go-to search engine]

Me in 2024: Google is the new Alta Vista! [in that everything is much harder to find than it should be and the relevance of results is plummeting]

#SearchIsDead #enshittification #SEO

maxleibman, to SEO
@maxleibman@mastodon.social avatar

Your skill as a writer is inversely proportional to the number of words you have added to an article for SEO purposes.

#SEO #PaddingIsntWriting #LongerIsntBetter #enshittification

maxleibman,
@maxleibman@mastodon.social avatar

Afraid of content jobs being taken over by AI? Then write for humans.

Stop padding, stop vamping, stop over-explaining the background, stop putting the answer to the question below the fold, stop click-farming, stop writing for machine indexing, and stop putting a single word anywhere in the piece for any reason other than to make it a better piece of WRITING for HUMANS to read.

If you write for machines, you deserve to be replaced by an .

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