this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
851 points (97.6% liked)

Showerthoughts

30416 readers
895 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
    • If you feel strongly that you want politics back, please volunteer as a mod.
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report the message goes away and you never worry about it.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] UnknownQuantity 24 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I ran a business, built my website and done SEO according to advice found on the internet practically just using keywords related to my business. My goal was not to be on page 2 or 3 when people look for similar businesses. The site ended up always as a first result. I did not tinker with it, never paid for adwords/adsense. I don't think I was being an asshole, just trying to make a living.

The problem seems to lie with Google. I remember days when I could search it for topics of interest and get results that were informative and didn't try to sell me shit. Google is now reminiscent more of a mall and search results are shop fronts in the mall.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Yeah I don’t think businesses doing SEO is really the issue here.

It’s the millions of low-quality, garbage blogspam websites that have SEOd their way into filling the first 10 pages of every single search.

What’s a good canister vacuum? What I can I do for fun in Sparks, Nevada? Why is my cat throwing up? It doesn’t matter what you search for, you’re going to get articles filled with 6000 words of barely-passable English that you have to scroll through, with an add between every paragraph, until you finally get to the part where they “answer” the question with the most common-sense, useless, vague pile of word vomit that proves the author doesn’t know any more about the topic than you do.

But it’s no accident that that’s what Google has tuned their algorithm to prioritize. They’ve got as much of an interest in making you look at those ads as the website, because the ads come from Google and that’s their entire business model.

[–] UnknownQuantity 11 points 2 years ago

I'm finding that those searches will be advertisement for a vet clinic, hotels in Sparks, Nevada and they will all have a blog about this and that in vague terms advising you to spend money on the issue. Years ago I was building a water garden and found tons of useful info, a couple of years ago I decided to make a big pond and all those sites with the useful info are either gone or buried on page 73. What's at the front is retailers of pond/garden/aquatic equipment with the same drivel about your cat throwing up.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Try duck duck go, brief subject, possibly include the word "forum" or "howto" or "Reddit" (I know I know) and then try to narrow down your search terms from there. Use quotation marks for keywords, and site: to denote specific websites that you want to limit your search to.

And that's basically the magic right there. Another key term to use is if you get too many results of a certain type, like if you search the word constitution and keep getting the ship, include the term -ship and that should remove those results.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Awesome tips, I’ll give those a try, thanks