this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Programming
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Have to disagree on that hard. SEO is a cancer on the Internet that has compromised usability and usefulness for a quick buck. A dedicated, ad-free search engine for the platform would be much more useful and likely to remain so.
But how do you find a website and the relevant content then?
I agree, that you should have a good search on a platform, specifically optimized on the scope of that platform, but it's just an unfortunate truth, that google is often better than these individual searches.
SEO could also just mean that all the stuff is actually server side rendered, so that google is able to find the content (which is not the case yet for lemmy-ui, but there is lemmy-ui-leptos in development, which should support that at someday)
Not sure that I have a good answer there but, with the rapid decline of major search engines because of SEO, paid result placement, and LLM-generated ad sites, I'm going to go with "probably not a major, ad-funded search engine". At the current rate, it is likely that it wouldn't even appear in the first page or three, even if clearly relevant. A non-commercial, community effort just can't compete like that.
SEO, in my experience having worked in the web hosting industry, has pretty specific meaning - gaming the search engine algorithms by using keywords, networks of unique IPs pointing to it, etc, almost be always with the intent of getting ad pages higher in the search results.
Yes, not being able to be rendered outside of ActivityPub easily makes it unlikely to appear in Google. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing and can be a forcing mechanism to change how we are interacting with the Internet and reduce the amount of participation in providing profit to those selling our personal information. Plus, there are many of us that don't want to contribute to learning data used to power LLMs that being used to worsen human life for profit.
I probably wouldn't see it that negative TBH. I'm often finding interesting content for whatever problem or interest I'm currently having via google (SO and yes reddit has also quite a lot to offer from the community). I rarely click anything that looks too profit-oriented and fortunately those pages although are on the first page, often aren't the first search result.
SEO got a little bit smarter nowadays, sure it's still a game with the search, but modern SEO is more focused on information and site design (e.g. does it display on mobile correctly?) etc. AFAIK.
Yeah there really are two "branches" that I'm aware of. One is the one that has a lot of overlap with accessibility and compatibility (following standards, ensuring design suits devices, etc). This one is anywhere from neutral to positive. The other is attempting to game the search engines to promote their results higher than more relevant content, often using questionable approaches and often for ad-derived profit.