The SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text
I realize I&#x27;m inviting the ire of HN, but I&#x27;m an SEO and fully agree with the sentiment of the article. Namely a lot of content on the web is purely for Google.<p>What some people miss is this isn&#x27;t just SEOs gaming the system. This is a system that Google explicitly asks for. I&#x27;ve watched John Mueller&#x27;s (a Google Search Rep) AMA sessions where he answers questions on SEO and he&#x27;s advocated for webmasters to add text onto product listing pages to &quot;help users&quot; get a clearer understanding of the page. Nope. It&#x27;s because even though Google has some of the best technology in the world, it&#x27;s search algo is still pretty dumb.<p>No person needs a few sentences of text on an ecommerce page about couches to understand the page is relevant to couches and sofas, but Google does because it only understands text. That&#x27;s also the reason why any recipe you find on the internet is buried at the bottom of the page.<p>The pointless adding of content to the internet is annoying as hell, but given that ChatGPT is able to create fairly cogent answers for a majority of queries it&#x27;s, I&#x27;m frankly surprised Google isn&#x27;t better.<p>Lastly, this article really only references creating content for SEO which is not all of SEO. Many parts of SEO actually do make sense. For example, making sure your content is actually visible onsite, redirecting old urls to new urls, making sure to internally link to pages people actually care about, etc... These should be website best practices but a ton of websites don&#x27;t do them.<p>Good SEO is hard. Creating changes that are good for Google + users takes a lot of thought, effort, and testing. Bad SEO (i.e generating a bunch of pages&#x2F;useless content for Google) is very easy and you don&#x27;t need to know anything about actual SEO to do it. For some reason anyone able to look up a keywords search volume and write a post is an SEO.