How is it possible to get rid of SEO? Search engines have to have some mechanism to determine order, and websites will get more clicks if they are at the top… those two things together will guarantee that sites care about optimizing their appearance in search results.
I used to be really big into SEO. I used to do things all the time by the book. I worked to get really good inbound links, worked to find great directories to link from, and was really into "white hat" SEO.
Fast forward a few years into the late aughts. Had a client who needed a site in less than two months. Some 15 pages of content, design, CMS and a new logo to boot. Was going to pay me a lot if I could do it.
I got it done and was sweating bullets because I had essentially copied all the content on his site from other sites in the same industry. I essentially aggregated all of the big players content into his site. I was petrified the site would get ranked and yanked and I'd spend months trying to get the site back into the SERPS.
Guess what happened?
Within a month, the site was outranking all the bigger companies in his industry. The site was one page 1 of Google in less than 60 days. All the companies he was competing with were at the bottom of page 1 or pushed to page 2. It never dropped lower than #3 on the first page in Google. The site broke nearly every cardinal rule of SEO - duplicate content, keyword stuffing, fake inbound links, etc. and still managed to be on the front page of Google for a host of long tail search terms and has continued to stay on the front page.
It just confirmed Google doesn't care about enforcing any of its rules any more. If I did what I did, I can only imagine what other people are doing to push their site into the top of the rankings.
Right. In all likelihood, the only way to do this is to make editorial choices: decide that some review sites are better than others, and start penalizing highly optimized garbage by its domain alone in a transparent manner.
I would use a search engine like this, but I understand why an existing trillion dollar multinational basically can't do this.
On the other hand, I do a lot of cooking, and recipe sites are forced to have these absurd winding narratives to appease the SEO gods. Nobody likes this and it really ought to be a solvable problem.
1. A table of contents section
2. About 30mb of AI, autogenerated filler ("Why should you foo?", "How does foo affect your dog?", "Can you foo a foo?", "Why you should foo twice a day?")
3. The same content plagiarized from each other's sites, just slightly reformatted/edited
4. NO ACTUAL INFORMATION ON HOW TO BARBAZ THE FOO
It's 2022, and there's still no way to filter this garbage out?
I'm sure there is, but there is an enormous corpus of data, and any filtering you add can end up impacting the legitimate sites you're trying to get to.
SEO spam is constantly adapting to changes in filtering. If you start filtering sites that have a table of contents, SEO spam will remove their ToC in no time, but authentic blog poster will probably not.
Real content producers don't have the time to chase every change to google's algorithm but SEO spammers do. How do you filter out the spammers who adapt to changes without affecting the real content producers who can't afford it?
I promise you, the problem is harder than you realize. And sure as shit a lot harder than "just add a bayesian filter and these 3 hard coded rules I just came up with"
I hate it when pages DON'T have a toc. I wanna see the headings with links so I can jump to the part of the page I care about. Not scroll through hoping to find it...
How would you stop that?