I know that the source is more focused on retro gaming as a topic but the topic of this post is Google and its pagerank algorithm which is more appropriate for this community.
We’ve all noticed the enshittification of Google Search over the last few months, but it’s still hard to hear how it is affecting content creators and putting them out of business so we can see 20 AI generated spam pages about whatever our query is.
…months?
Homie, Google search took a downturn in 2012, then a sharp downturn in 2018.
Months??
Over a decade.
Have you seen it recently? In the last month or two, it feels like they just flipped an enshittification switch and suddenly made the engine completely unusable. Its results are completely fucking bonkers now. Not least of which is because 90% of them are sponsored ads that aren’t necessarily relevant to what you searched.
Now even using quotes and specific sites isn’t guaranteed to get what you are looking for…
It was so good in 2004. It would find the good shit until people gamed the backlink strategy to the point Google stopped really using it
Yup. By and large, the SEO industry is a cancer.
Everything turns to shit whenever a metric becomes a goal, and multiply that by Infinity whenever that goal involves making money.
Ads are the worst thing about the internet. There’s not an option to escape them under any circumstances and when you use things like adblock people crawl out of the woodwork to tell you how you’re stealing money from people.
I’m sorry, I’m paying for the service of accessing the internet. How I do so should be my decision and not somebody else’s under any circumstances, so long as I am not breaking the law.
I agree in principle that commodifying page rank, and using trackers to identify would-be anons (to market at them or otherwise), and popups, and sponsored results, and in-content-ads, product placement, etc is all cancerous and shitty.
BUT to play devil’s advocate, how is it that one should make success of their business without advertising? I agree that most things in advertisement (like I mentioned) are scum of the earth, but I disagree that all of advertising is bad. It is an okay and righteous thing to promote yourself to others, especially where you can provide value!
To go full devil’s advocate (I don’t believe this but could absolutely debate it) I am going to say that advertising is the pinnacle achievement of art and science. It is by far the most interesting medium of communication – if you’re like an anthropologist, and you come across some bootable server full of TV ads from 1950 to 2020, you’d learn more about society than you would from just about any other medium of art or from just about any discipline that informs anthropologists.
In the last few months there has been the highly visible changes that include adding the generative AI search experience but you are right. Google search has been getting more and more useless as time has gone on
While Google certainly has a lot of responsibility for how shit their search results have become and the effects they have on website operators, the SEO industry can all go eat a giant bag of dicks for being the driving force behind making search results worthless trash.
Google also is responsible for the SEO industry. They made ads hugely profitable, then started directing traffic to sites that serve more of their ads, regardless of quality.
Google also is responsible for the SEO industry
I did a search for “retro handheld news” and they were like #7 and I did a search for “Anbernic rg353” and they were #8. I have blockers on and above Retro Dodo was Anbernic’s official site (fair), an Aliexpress site that is not Anbernic’s (crap), Amazon third part sellers (also crap), and one YouTube reviewer with 41k subs.
So his assessment is fair but I always tried to avoid Retro Dodo before because on its early days they always had some kind of info wrong or they don’t go more in depth with their reviews. Their site ranking was always higher then better sites with better content.
It’s likely that our website structure isn’t perfect or that our content may likely be “over-optimised” for Google, but at least tell me. I am no SEO expert;l I have a million plates to spin as a content website operator, and I cannot get everything right. If Google were to inform me what I was doing incorrectly then I could change that, but they don’t. They just keep hiding our work, month after month after month.
Really curious about this.
On DuckDuckGo they’re the second result for “retro handheld news”.
Same on Kagi, right after retrohandhelds.gg.
What a sad faith for a website named after the glorious Dodo.
Faith
Fate?
Indeed, thanks!
Tbh, retro dodo’s site and content is shit. Retro Game Corps is the shit.
In my experience this guy is right.
Just compare DuckDuckGo results to Google results.
I still have a lot of de-googling to do. However at this point, I only use google as a search engine maybe once/month, and it’s frankly usually for the google business info…thing. For everything else, I use Kagi and quite frankly have not looked back. Probably one of the few services that I happily pay for.
I bought an Ayn Odin 2 recently and noticed how hard it was to find Russ/Retro Game Corp’s site and videos even when searching directly for retro game corps. It was like the results some days were buried and other times I could find them in the top few.
This is so sad.
Yeah I’ve noticed ai generated garbage articles more and more recently on search. Wish that they could be filtered out and if anything Google should be incentivized to do that because if you’re training ai models on ai generation then it’s not gonna be good for the end product.
