SEO Criticism

Comments primarily criticize SEO practices for prioritizing appearance over quality, ruining web content, and emerging as a problem for AI search engines, with some defending legitimate strategies.

📉 Falling 0.5x Web Development
3,806
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#7527
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Keywords

SEO e.g SERVER HN LLM ML DOWNTIME BTW AND NOT seo hat site plumbing traffic company content google black firm

Sample Comments

CaptSpify Aug 10, 2017 View on HN

SEO isn't about doing the right thing, it's about looking like you are doing the right thing

jpwagner Jun 14, 2012 View on HN

how is this not good? it's exactly how "seo" became an everyday term...

allreduce Jan 11, 2026 View on HN

Sounds in effect like what SEO / "trash article soup" companies did for Google et al the last decades.

vintagedave Dec 7, 2024 View on HN

Upvoted not for the article but for attention on the issue: SEO for AIs.There is nothing that people seeking clicks won't ruin.

mohanmcgeek May 5, 2021 View on HN

Google used to be good at countering these "SEO optimizations"

endisneigh Mar 19, 2022 View on HN

The fact SEO wasn’t mentioned once makes this lose all credibility imho

TulliusCicero Oct 20, 2021 View on HN

The SEO places aren't dumb, they do their best to mimic legit content.

machiaweliczny Jun 15, 2023 View on HN

They could build Bard, they can have ML model to judge if site is SEO spam but the more you click/search the more money for them.

peanut_worm Nov 7, 2021 View on HN

SEO has really ruined the internet

hadlock May 30, 2024 View on HN

There's no world with SEO that is a positive, don't delude yourself