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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Technology
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SEO is of itself is not all bad. Content creators need to do certain things, which do little directly for the consumer, but help the algo understand what the content is and how the owner would prefer it be seen. For example, something simple like the title attribute of a web page tells the search engine how it should label the content in the search results. That's SEO and generaly a good thing for everyone.
As you say, the "please like, subscribe, comment and say a prayer to the algo" annoyance is just what we have to accept for free content on these platforms. It's the cost of anyone being able to upload video to YT.
Where it goes wrong imho, is filling the world with essentially meaningless machine produced content to aid in the rankings. This isn't new with AI btw. People have been using article "spinning" or outsourced garbage content creation for years or decades to do the same and potentially even better than what AI does. In the old days building thousands of links from garbage content to your content in order to have the algo see the links as "votes" for the supposed quality of the content. Those of us who ran forums saw this all the time.
SEO is wrong - it's like an arms race where the shittiest party spending the most wins and every one else needs to play by the rules to even exist.
The world would be better off if noone did it in the first place and search engines could just do the job they intended to do.
Google totally went to shit in the last years with their first page often full of websites great at SEO but horrible in whatever you were actually looking for.
Meanwhile the little ultra-specific forum that had a thread years ago about your specific search and no money for SEO is somewhere on page 5 while websites just repeating the search phrase over and over with no answer in sight are at the top.
That whole industry can cease to exist from one day to the next and nothing of value would be lost - if anything value would be gained for the average person
That last point can't be stressed enough. The whole marketing sector is essentially a net negative to society because neither an actual product gets produced nor any useful service is offered.
A decade or so ago, this was a really bad problem, especially with sites like Experts Exchange et al. Content farms just grabbing your query and puking back to you. Or, sites that would take a thread on one forum, and then replicate it across 10 other sites as though they're different forums, but it's the exact same posts. But it's gotten so, so, so much worse in the last year or so. Google searches these days are like wading through a septic tank trying to find a microgram of gold.
Now they can cut out the middle man and have a robot do that. The Future is Now.
Want to back you up on a point. People have been copy/pasting, or adding fluff like a high school paper, to AP articles since its inception. This was happening well before the earliest days of the internet.