torchma t1_iwtiph5 wrote on November 18, 2022 at 5:54 AM

Reply to comment by aspacelot in [OC] Goldfishes have longer attention spans than humans online by alison359

> Google’s advertising structure has made it so there’s plenty of shit sites out there that only exist to trick us into clicks to serve us ads

That has nothing to do with Google's ad model. You can't pay google to improve your page's rank on a search. Ads are completely separate from search results. The internet has simply gotten much bigger and much shittier, diluting useful information.

aspacelot t1_iwtjsot wrote on November 18, 2022 at 6:07 AM

I was referring to Googles requirements for higher placement and their SEO requirements in general.

Think recipe sites: you ever wonder why every site has a backstory about discovering the recipe and changes made and how their hubby just can’t get enough and basically a mini novel before the actual recipe? Google won’t rank pages that are simply the ingredients, pictures, and instructions. They have word count requirements which “fluff” whatever you’re looking for and add pace needs to deliver their advertising. Another one is game sites that are basically written by a bot. Google “does NEW GAME have coop?” And you’ll inevitably find a link to a site that’s fluffed so much that it starts with “NEW GAME is a GAME TYPE coming out on date. It’s made by xxx and releases on yyy. In the game…” and just goes on and on and on despite the page title being “does game have coop?”

The only reason those shit sites rank high are because they can game the SEO requirements AND use google adwords to deliver advertising for Google. So there are bogus sites AND “Ad” placed sites (which tbh I don’t see because I use Brave). This waters down the quality of what most users actually want. Couple that with Google stripping answers from legitimate sites and not paying revenue and delivering the information on their home page it creates a scenario where they’ve disincentivized companies from running legitimate information or news sites and instead conform to what Google wants adding to the shit pile and letting one corporation control our primary source of information.

torchma t1_iwtk9c7 wrote on November 18, 2022 at 6:12 AM

Are you talking about chrome or Google search? Does Google make money from ads in chrome? If you've navigated to a fluff site and away from Google, does Google still make money?

aspacelot t1_iwtni1g wrote on November 18, 2022 at 6:52 AM

No I’m just talking about Google the search engine. Yes, sites use a service called AdWords from Google to allow Google to put “hooks” into their code to deliver Google ads and track users across the web.

If you have a Google account and have logged in then you go to website.com directly (even without using Google search) and website.com uses AdWords, Google tracks that you go to that site (because AdWords tells them) and then they (Google) delivers ads to you on website.com and pats website.com for it as well as delivering ads across the web to other AdWords sites. It’s why the “allow cookies” pop ups happen now because in the EU they’ve started passing regulations against this type of networked tracking.

So if I want to make a some money I’d make a site called “downfallOfTwitter.com.” I’d use a bot to fluff up content with bullshit, format the site to googles SEO specifications, sign up for AdWords and link it into my site (you basically just copy/paste what they give you and plop it into the header section of the HTML in your site) and then wait for the $$ because right now “end of twitter” “twitter dying” “downfall of twitter” and stuff like that are big time search words on Google. Inevitably my garbage site will rank high due to SEO compliance and key search word similarities yet I’d actually deliver no content. I’d have another one of those sites you’d land on and bounce away from after 8 seconds- BUT- I’d have delivered ads to you and made pennies (or fractions of cents). Throw in a quick Facebook ad campaign for my site to boost traffic, add a low dollar twitter and Reddit one. Make a Reddit account to post a link to my site as though it’s legitimate news in r/News or r/JusticeServed or literally any sub with even the most tenuous connection and then I’m making some dough.

Multiply that by whatever other current topics are trending and I’m officially part of the reason search results are garbage and people know within 8 seconds what bullshit looks like online.

torchma t1_iwyozor wrote on November 19, 2022 at 11:06 AM

Are you saying that Google's SEO favors sites that use AdWords or simply that Google doesn't have an incentive to fix their SEO, because sites that game the SEO benefit Google through AdWords? The former possibility seems illegal.