Yes. They both did.

Google came to prominence because it sidestepped the first gen SEO of keywords.

Then it became a bloated corp run by MBAs.

SEO took off and it did little to nothing as its search platform was now there to deliver eye balls to advertisers.

Many things have ruined the Internet, corporate greed, the proliferation of low quality content, paywalls, advertising, websites infested with user registration, AI, bots, shitty web page builders, etc... This was such a great article except the alligator was only five and a half feet long.

Does anyone ever talk about how we can fix it?

I noticed something was wrong when every article repeated what I was asking as many times as possible.

They're all pretty much written in the same style now, and it's next to impossible to find the actual information you're looking for under all the bullshit.

I don't blame SEO 'experts' or Google. I blame greed.

Unregulated capitalism did.

Why is it “or”..? It’s as if the Verge has lost the ability to write a non-clickbait title.

And the answer is “both have” of course. The folks who make the game are as guilty as those who played it.

Perhaps this is why nearly everyone hates SEO and the people who do it for a living: the practice seems to have successfully destroyed the illusion that the internet was ever about anything other than selling stuff.

Ah, the author is young. Many of us remember the Internet before e-commerce.

Yes.

That article downplays SEO and mostly argues that Google is responsible, and it still gives Google way too much credit. I mean, it's gonna take a lot more evidence to make me believe they broke the internet by accident, for one. People knew all this crap would happen before Google was even a thing.

SEO experts AND GOOGLE

the people who ruined the internet are the people. google, internet users and product owners have mutually adversarial relationships, so relying on google all this time naturally led to this.

I think this 8000+ word article's length is indicative of the "real" answer: it's complicated.

I read the whole thing. Lots of great personalities and examples spanning from AltaVista to Large Language models and everything in between.

I think the quote that resonated with me the most, to summarize this article's main thesis in a sound bite, was this:

You can’t just be the most powerful observer in the world for two decades and not deeply warp what you are looking at

In essence, it's the fault of having a dominant algorithm dictating what the Internet "is". Google is the tool most people use for most of their information seeking. Thus, getting a high ranking from Google is the difference between success and failure.

imho, the only real solution is decentralization. Federated services, local newspapers, new search engines, idk.

And yet, Google is still my default search engine. So I'm part of the problem.

They both contributed.

Greed of both SEO and Google.

It was the battle between SEO "experts" and Google that did it.

What strikes me is that Google doesn't fix some of the blatant offenders. For example, the other day I was looking for tablets, so I seached for "best tablets of 2023". And it's obvious that many websites are auto-generated, that the content itself was written several years ago, and the years have magically been updated to the present. Half of the first ten links are to pages like this.

I don't expect Google to de-list things. But I do expect that the developers would look at the top ten results for common searches like this and penalize major websites for intentionally creating deceptive content.

Similarly, I would expect all search engines to lower ratings on websites that are ad-heavy. Users want information, not sparkly ads. This is easy to detect and optimize for.

But hey, people wanna make their money, so they'll do what they do.

It was the unholy marriage of the two

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Maybe I could even repackage such a tragedy into a sensationalized anecdote for a viral article about the people who do SEO for a living, strongly implying that nature was here to punish the bad guy while somehow also assuming the ethical high ground and pretending I hadn’t been hoping this exact thing would happen from the start.

He was the kind of tall, charming man who described himself multiple times as “a nerd,” and he pointed out that even though working directly with search engine rankings is “no longer monetizing at the highest payout,” the same “core knowledge of SEO” remains relevant for everything from native advertising to social media.

As sunset turned to dusk, I found Daron Babin again, and he started telling me about one of his signature moves, back in the ’90s, involving fake domain names: “I could make it look like it was somebody else, but it actually redirected to me!” What he and his competitors did was legal but well beyond what the dominant search engine allowed.

Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke, beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm, frantically pulling levers behind the scenes but ultimately somewhat hapless.

Google was slow to allow someone to talk with me, possibly because of the giant PR clusterfuck that has been the company’s past year (accused by the federal government of being a monopoly; increasingly despised by the public; losing ground to Reddit, TikTok, and large language models), so I decided to start by meeting up with a chipper, charismatic man named Duane Forrester.

Once he represented Bing, Forrester more or less stopped drinking at conferences, as had long been the case for his counterpart at Google, an engineer named Matt Cutts, who helped build and then ran the company’s web spam team before stepping back in 2014 and leaving in 2016.

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