It seems the websites with the most poor-quality, ad-filled, possibly incorrect information are the ones trying to game the system the most. If you're someone who just has a blog or website and is focused on the content, this turns ahrefs into a 'cartel' you must pay into if you want your own SEO to be on the same par as those spending all their time on seo optimization.
I worked for a company in the SEO space a bit over a decade ago, initially to try and learn the things you call out above. My surprise at the time was to discover most of the snake oil being sold as “SEO” was nothing more than basic usability 101 stuff. Make sure titles are descriptive. Try to use terms that your readers would use and recognise to ensure the content resonates. Structure your content in a sensible way with clear headings. It’s almost like Google were trying to turn a human experience into an algorithm! ;) There was obviously a bunch of black hat stuff too but the efficacy of that was generally pretty short lived and the techniques tightly held. The whole SEO industry seemed to be in on the joke that you only spoke about those techniques or provided training on them after they stopped working.
Something seems to have changed since that time though. I don’t think it’s Ahrefs because there were similar services long before them. Did Google lose their way and stop trying to quantify a human experience? I had my concerns back then when they introduced the concept of a canonical URL for duplicate content, something that’s implemented in a way to only be useful for a bot and not a person. But I’ve been too distant to these things to know if it was an isolated example or the beginning of a trend. Did the cat and mouse game of improving usability come to a plateau and now we’re in the inevitable end game of exploiting edge cases and 2% improvements? Is this what should have been the completely predictable state we’d end up given the alignment of incentives? Search results that are _just_ good enough so that you don’t abandon Google, but not so good that you click a result instead of an ad.
I don’t know what the cause is, or if it’s even just one thing. But it definitely feels like it’s been getting progressively worse for a long time and that the rate of decline has been accelerating.
To that end I’ve personally switched to Kagi. It’s at least ticked the “just good enough” box for me for a few months, which is something that never stuck with DDG. And so I fronted the cash for an annual subscription incase the incentive system with Google was part of the problem. I figure me moaning about it while still active using it means I’m complicit in being part of the problem too. And so I should vote with both my feet and dollars in support of any team that’s actually trying to fix things.
I also worked at a SEO company but not with a goal, although I also left there disgusted with the practice. The issue however (IMO) is that there's SEO at the article level and SEO at a strategic level.
At the article level, it is indeed mostly harmless, except when they catch some Google bias such as removing dates and edit notices from blog posts (because evergreen articles supposedly rank better), force a certain word count, H1/H2 count and paragraph size (which is why you get a life story before a recipe), or when it teaches you to disguise keyword stuffing and you get articles with semi-nonsensical paragraphs that can rank high. This is mostly annoying, though.
But IMO the biggest problem is SEO at a strategic level, which is what's done with the help of tools like Moz and Ahrefs. Websites often hire content agencies to make a large number of low-quality articles targeting popular searches that don't show too many results yet. Basically "balancing" demand/supply. But this practice puts non-SEO-optimized results at the bottom and replaces them with low-quality articles written by freelancers. This forces non-commercial publishers into bigger websites (like StackOverflow, Quora or Reddit). It also causes a lot of duplicate content, since those content agencies uses existing content from results as the basis for their own articles, only SEO optimized. The articles are of course rewritten so it's not word-by-word plagiarism. They also help evading Google measures to fix results. The latest trend when I was still in the industry was having unrelated companies helping each other do inorganic link-building by putting random links in more popular websites also controlled by those agencies, but that's probably old stuff by now.
It's been about a decade since I did anything serious with SEO. I knew it was sleezy garbage then, but did it for the money. I would outright lie to non-profits to get links from their sites to my seemingly legit site. After a few weeks I'd 301 it to my main site. I really feel bad about this. I did a lot of other underhanded shit to rank highly and it all worked.
The biggest problem was feeling like a bad human and not wanting to tell my friends about how I made money on my side hustle. I am really glad I sold those sites and left SEO behind.
I disagree, and I'll also note that being out of a field for a decade in tech is a long time (late 2000's SEO was very different). To prove the contrary point is really the easiest thing in the world.
1. Think of some product niche: say, best dog toys.
2. Google it.
3. Click on the top 5 search results.
4. Now, judge for yourself: Are these good quality links which look like they were written by a smart human who simply bought a bunch of dog toys and tested them, and is speaking from their personal experience? OR, are the search results gamified to hell, and clearly not something any normal person would think to write by themselves?
I think it's clear in 2022: you have to write in an artificial style and make a lot of unintuitive choices to rank on Google, which is to say, to have anyone online be aware of and using your website. You also have to compete against giant incumbents now who will crush you if you don't come educated and ready to rank against them. So you no choice but to learn SEO techniques, really.
Note: I'm not an SEO guy, I make $0 off SEO. I'm an independent developer who's concluded, if I want to make any money off my own websites, I can learn SEO or I can be poor. And I don't enjoy being poor. So there's not really much of a choice imho, at this point in the timeline.
One of the big developments in the SEO space seems to be making every title too detailed and specific. If you are a plumbing company that serves the whole country, your seo involves auto generating pages that mention a specific suburb or city. So when someone searches something specific, it looks like your page is the most local and correct.
Another one for products is having the same category named with 2000 related titles so it shows up for the exact search terms someone is searching even if they aren’t quite accurate to the category.
