That’s not what SEO is for
There is such a dearth of information online nowadays or maybe the information is there, just inaccessible. Will search engines wake up and stop serving SEO traps instead of actual informative articles?
A few years ago (ahem, a decade ago) I used to call Google “my best friend” (you know, because I’m autistic and I didn’t have an actual human best friend at the time) because whatever I was interested in, someone had written something online about it and I could search and find it in a few seconds.
There were blogs, Wikipedia articles with links to various not very academic sources, forums where people shared information, so many places.
I got used to that being the case and I’d search for anything from photos of dragonflies and information about their ecology, stuff about volcanoes, psychology, history, physics, anything I could think of or came up in a conversation.
I wanted to check a fact that I was unsure of, a quick search cleared it up.
I wanted to know a bit more info about a specific product, I’d look it up and find out.
I wanted to fix something, I’d look it up and there was a full tutorial on how to do it.
How awesome and handy, especially for someone without access to a library that has practical books and journals.
But today, none of this is possible.
Any topic you search for nowadays has tens of articles that are “optimized” for your search terms and show up in the first few pages of the search results, but they are all copies of each other, written in basic (bad) English, most without proper syntax, some with some blatant contradictions.
And the worst part is that they are all featured on the websites of businesses that sell products or services related to said search query!
How can a business website provide the most accurate and non-biased articles regarding a generic topic? Of course they will say that what you searched for is a problem and that they have the solution, without offering actual details about the thing or their product.
I used to be an expert at search terms because I knew exactly what to search for to get relevant results for my very specific query. Not any more.
Let’s try some examples
I recently searched for information regarding roof ladders. Would telescopic ladders be safe enough to be used on a roof with roof hooks?
No idea because I never found any results relevant to any of the queries I tried.
Regardless of what I searched for, I’d get literal ads from companies selling ladders or roofing services, all being amazed by how great and small and bla bla bla these ladders are, none of them providing basic information about the ladders themselves.
Would they keep their integrity if secured from the top instead of the bottom? It’s still a mystery and we’ve since bought another type of ladder that folds up into itself and is too short. But at least is made to be secured in multiple spots. So boohoo to all the sites selling telescopic ladders.
No info, no telescopic ladder for us. Oh, I also asked a production representative a similar question about their ladders and they could not give me a competent answer. Just sent on the same info that was incomplete in the shop.
Add relevant information to your product listings, people!
It’s more important to be able to find essential information in a basic shop listing than to have a “search engine optimized” article on the topic that you paid 4$ for and that’s copied from your competitor’s identical article full of the same drivel.
Another example
I wanted to know whether bandanas on dogs are safe for them or uncomfortable or anything, seeing as I don’t have a dog and would like to make something for my future dog or for dogs in shelters because they need love too.
But guess what. There’s no way to find out whether there are people out there who think these things are uncomfortable for dogs (or even who have any cons to putting them on dogs) because all the search results are flooded with copy-paste articles full of crap from companies that sell triangles of cloth as if they were the thing that will save your dog’s life, when in fact they are just triangles of cloth…
I have found out all about the three advantages of putting tiny pieces of cloth on your dog, although they don’t really make sense. People are trying to paint dog bandanas as stuff that is so useful, when in fact it’s just a fashion statement. On the part of the “owner” (how do I say “person who lives with a dog and takes care of them” in one word without sounding like animals are property?), mind you, as I’m pretty sure dogs don’t care about bandanas.
What’s even more disgusting is that there was a badly written question on Quora that appeared in the search results and the answers were even more badly written and coming from… You guessed it, people who sell bandanas (I added the link because it’s so bad it’s funny).
I’m pretty sure the question was asked by the same person that replied with two other false accounts because the way the English is butchered is similar in both the question and the answers.
So I guess I will make a pattern for a dog bandana, but will also mention that maybe dogs like them, maybe they don’t, it’s a mystery of the world that will never be solved.
The worst offender
There are so many other examples like this that I could give you, as this happens every day and with the most basic stuff.
If there’s a product or service associated with the stuff you’re searching for, give up before you get bombarded with false or unverifiable information.
But what bugs me the most and I’ve even been a victim of this and have no idea how to stop it, is the scraped content article.
These I believe are generated by bots (“AI” where the intelligence is in the dump) based on long or medium tail search terms (things that are 2–5 words long, with variations).
They actually take search terms and associated search terms (variations) and copy information from genuine articles that are in the top search results for each specific term.
They use these search terms as headings and copy one paragraph of the “answer” or content from the actual high quality source, creating a mishmash that looks legible, at least to the search engines (I think they don’t copy more because then they’d be penalized by the search engines for not having original content).
Kind of like what Google does when you search for something with high volume and it creates a little window within the search results page and just shows you the information from that page without you actually visiting said website.
But worse, because these sites are rife with ads (the whole reason these sites exist), full of these fake articles with “information” that is completely disconnected from any context.
Of course they don’t point to where they got the information from (you know, the good ol’ attribution and citation of your sources) so you can read more on the topic and maybe understand something, if not exactly what you were searching for.
But because they are packed with search terms and look like articles (even though they are not written by a human, have no structure or logic to them, nor any useful information), they show up in the first page of search results for so many search terms, pushing genuine sources down and out.
They even have these weird, unreadable names, without any contact info, no photos in the actual content (apparently photos have copyright, but text doesn’t, in Google’s eyes), so you can’t find them again even if you try to (unless you are friends with your browser’s history or know exactly what you searched for previously and the site hasn’t yet disappeared).
And yet there’s no way to report these to search engines so that they don’t show up in search results any more. They bring in cash by serving lots of ads and the search engines are happy to let them thrive.
Even if it means that people who write genuinely high quality content are pushed out of the reach of people searching for that content, which means that people will slowly abandon search engines because they only serve ads or crap or both (most ads are crap nowadays).
What is happening to the internet? Will we go back to meeting in person and buying physical copies of books and booklets about basic crafts and life skills, or will we once again transmit our accumulated knowledge only from master to apprentice?
I love learning from other people online and love sharing my knowledge as well. It saddens me that, despite being at the height of my professional development and having so much to share, because I started too late (a whole decade too late), now all my potential readers are stuck reading crappy fake articles compiled by bots because that’s all that they can find.
I mean, I’m not even sure that I’d have more success now with my content had I started earlier, maybe, but at least I’d have a larger email list.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on clickbait videos with fake content…
How I combat this
I couldn’t leave you on such a sad note.
The only solution I’ve found so far is to search for my topic of interest on Google Scholar and on ResearchGate (you know, the place where I saw the stuff I wrote about last time), where sometimes I’m lucky to find something relevant and accessible (I sadly no longer have access through my university library).
These sources haven’t yet been completely perverted by capitalist interests (by that I mean that there are still public funds available for research, despite there being publications by industry research facilities as well, which, let’s be honest, have an implicit bias), so there’s a higher chance that there’s some information available in the scientific realm.
You do need a thick skin and a lot of patience with the wooden language that is required (is it, though? or is it just white patriarchy? I’ll let you mull on that) to be able to publish in scientific journals. So it’s not for everyone.
But it is one solution to the problem of search engines serving their own interests and prioritizing big revenue sources (fake sites full of ads) over the wellbeing of their users (who should not trust fake websites as much as they do, but alas…).
Hope this helped (it helped me, that’s why I wrote it, great for letting go of frustrations) and here’s a pupper in a bandana because of course I did.
