The Current State of the Internet | SEO Destroying Content
Hey all. This post is going to be a bit of a rant and also my views regarding the current state of the internet. I'd love to see your thoughts on this as well.
Google!
So, Google has been the go-to search engine for most of us. Finding the things that you search for easily has been something that every single one of us does. This could be for your research on a particular topic or it could also be you searching for an answer to the problem that you're facing.
I mainly use Google to get quick updates on cricket, football, and basketball matches. Being able to see the past and future fixtures have definitely made it very easy for me to plan ahead of time. I also use Google from time to time for any blockchain-related info, be it programming or just info regarding how it works. Well, if I was completely new to this world, I would have just accepted the info that was fed to me and been done with it.
However, I have been around this space and have a bit of hands-on experience working in this environment. So, when some article is feeding us incorrect information, I always wonder how on earth did that even makes it to the first page on Google.
So, I began to network around to figure out how this happens and the amount of things that I discovered along the way makes me want to stick to just a few websites for information. So, let me go over the things which made me feel like the information is destroying the internet.
SEO: The Destroyer of the WEB:
I know that this sub-heading is a bit too dramatic. However, this is what it's come to right now.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short was a system designed to provide guidelines to websites that allowed them to rank higher when someone searches for a term on the internet. The amount of work that one has to put in is so high that we now also have experts in this field who can help you rank your website higher for specific keywords.
SEO is now a big threat
First, let me get into Bing. This seems to be one of the least moderated search engines out there. So, never use it! I repeat! Never use it!. So, for a while, I was using Edge and the default search engine over there is Bing. I don't remember exactly what I had searched for(I remember it was something related to Solana). However, the very first link was a phishing website that literally asked me for the seed phrase. The reason for this? This site was better optimized. So, it ranked higher than the actual site.
Dudckduckgo is still pretty good. however, the interface is something that I am not yet that used to. But a great search engine if you care about your privacy.
Now, coming to Google. If you search for any crypto-related topic on Google, you will get a ton of links with the information that you're looking for. Most of the articles on the first page are from reputed websites and the articles themselves are very engaging. So, one would obviously love to read such articles. The websites on the first page have a very high SEO ranking and they most probably do deserve it as they are such great articles.
So, where's the problem? Well, the articles sure are engaging. However, are we sure that the information in the article is fully correct? A few days ago, a friend of mine sent me a screenshot of an article she was reading regarding cryptocurrencies. Basically, most of my friends are very new to crypto and some are still in their research phase, deciding if it's all a scam or not.
That screenshot that she shared pissed me off. It was an explanation for the 51% attack. So, a new person who reads this would straight away think that Blockchains can easily be hacked. However, they are not aware of the resources required to launch such an attack At this time, it's simply impossible to launch a 51% attack on Bitcoin.
Later on, I started to read a few articles for myself and the amount of crap these high-ranked articles shill out would keep anyone at bay. A common man's understanding would be that Google is always right and it would never show incorrect information. But people need to understand that Google cannot vet every single article on the internet. Since SEO is what decides the rank of the website, more people getting incorrect information is extremely high.
Who Generates Such Garbage Content:
Well, it should be pretty obvious from the tone of my sub-headings, I am PISSED! Content creation is such a lucrative field right now that many college and school kids now dive into it. Yup! you heard me right! The content you read on the internet might not be written by the same person. Ghostwriters are hired for a very low price to write articles.
These articles are usually written in a day. So, you can understand how little research goes into this content.
How do I know who the ghostwriters are?
Well, as I mentioned previously, I was extremely pissed with the crap content being ranked so high. So, I decided to go down the rabbit hole and eventually got in touch with a person who runs a content writing firm. His firm basically provides ghostwriting services to other clients. These ghostwriters are all school and college kids who get paid about $100-$150 every single month to produce 24,000 words per month.
For a broke college kid, this is a lot of money here in India as our expenses are already taken care of by our parents. So, they are very happy. The content that's given to clients is not always vetted. However, it is very well optimized for certain keywords, they end up ranking very high. Thus causing its issue.
How do we stay safe from incorrect information:
I now stick to doing my own research than looking at research done by others. Be it for programming purposes(for this I trouble some of the other witnesses who I talk to over here) or for blockchain-related info(I now go to official project channels and get my info directly from the creators).
The other way one could stay safe from such info is by the correct usage of the POB or Proof of Brain consensus Here on Steem, quality posts are voted and the weightage of votes decides the ranking of a particular post. While the system should work in theory, the usage of bots to vote for crap content makes it a bit hard to find good posts over here. This system has the power to transform the internet into something much better than what we have today. This is what I'm hoping to see eventually.
Closing thoughts:
With the amount of incorrect information on the web, it is no surprise that most countries oppose cryptocurrencies. I feel the right source of information needs to come from someone who works in the industry and not from a ghostwriter on the internet. Stay safe guys. Get your information from the right sources.
Hi! I can only confirm your words. I used to create my own amateur sites, write content for them myself, optimize them as best I could. One of the sites had 5,000 visitors a day. It was dedicated to science and I'm sure visitors thought it was written by an "expert".
Later, Google improved the search algorithm, and without investing, to bring the article to the top 10 for search queries became very difficult. Traffic to my sites dropped and I closed them.
Then I started writing articles to order. It was a good extra income. I could write articles that were optimized for a particular search query. I had to write about electric cars, furniture, repairs in apartments, advertising services, etc. The only thing I didn't do was medicine.
That's why I agree with you, most of the content we read with you is created unprofessionally.
Right now, I'm in a WhatsApp group with around 40 other college/school kids and three pro content creators. They are literally writing reviews about products that they have never used. Crypto articles too. Articles I see are mainly just rephrased well and optimized to rank higher for certain keywords. It's a sad state. Unless you actually know a particular topic yourself, you cannot call out the incorrect information.
There's an article on the internet that claims that double spending on Bitcoin network is an easy task. So, these are the incorrect claims that are irritating to me. It's not just the internet at this point. Even the local news channels here in India also put up a lot of crap just cause it gets them more TRP.
SEO for the internet is something like bid bots for Steemit. SEO brings money, so it is insurmountable.
Haha... That analogy is epic🤣
A very interesting rant and obviously one that's getting my attention 🙂
Whilst the view is that most of what is written is crap, Google's algorithm also takes into account how long people spend on a particular page after clicking through from their search results (i.e. if the bounce rate is high, the algorithm ranks the page lower). So in theory, the "weightage of votes" is done (in a way that I believe Steemit should do it) by the page view time - admittedly only as one of it's many inputs. So Google serves up the content that people are reading - that people want to read for a particular search term. A bit like the TV news when there's a disaster - everybody complains about the constant coverage (and the lack of new information), but it's only there because everybody's still watching it. Google's the same.
For some reason, people are attracted to bad news so any search for cryptocurrency will likely see the bad news before the good because it's what people read. If your friends are finding these articles and choosing this information to share / debate with you, it suggests that they've also found it because it supports their already held beliefs that crypto is bad.
I think that part of the problem is a phrase you'll know as a programmer - "Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO)". Choosing the correct search term - identifying the "long tail" that you're interested in will get you much better results that the generic shitty search terms that most people use. Searching for "Cryptocurrency" is unlikely to give you a balanced opinion versus "the pros and cons of investing in cryptocurrency".
Websites that Google returns are akin to Authors on Steemit. There are good and there are bad. Bad websites / authors write bad articles. Good websites / authors sometimes write bad articles too.
And this is not to mention our own biases - we decide that an article is full of crap when it might be somebody else's truth.
I don't know much about ghost-writers though. They probably research a topic using search engines themselves, proliferating the "GIGO" analogy.
I wonder if a search engine like Yandex or Baidu will give you a better frame to view the world through?
The search engine is as shit as the cartoon. Perhaps shitter. And much like the cartoon, I have no idea when I last saw it.
Source
Yup. They already believe that the whole blockchain tech is a scam. I've literally lost count of the hours I've spent trying to explain this. Now, I guess it's not worth it anymore.
Crap content is kind of easy to spot It's the incorrect facts spit out by content writers with no experience that's worrisome. I know that it's really very hard or moreover impossible to vet everything that goes up on the internet. But the role I feel SEO is playing right now is hurting the whole internet.
That explains a lot. We'll often seek out opinions and views that support our already held beliefs.
So long as we know that what we're reading was written through a certain "lens", then we can interpret it as we wish. Unfortunately, many read and believe without further questioning the author's motives.
If there were no SEO, I don't know what we'd have...?
SEO is needed. But not the way it is right now. Currently, it feels like the big guys have gamed the system.
They always will. They’ll always have the resources to hire the people that ensure they appear at the top. Irrespective of the algorithm or system used or appropriateness of them being there.