Human vs Machine – Search Engine Optimisation

Years ago, on a particular writing site, a few sharp users realised that S.E.O, (Search Engine Optimisation) ruled.

That a Search engine, being given a term to retrieve would go to an item which was jam packed with the term and related terms.

To make it very clear; a good writer might post as follows;

“Captain James T. Kirk captained the original Enterprise. He was a young, daring man, who was ‘on the ground’ instead of sending away teams.”

S.E.O. would look for keywords; hence, Captain Kirk entered into the search box would sooner find;

“Captain James T. Kirk was the captain of the original Enterprise.  Captain Kirk  was a young, daring man. Captain Kirk was ‘on the ground’.   Captain James T. Kirk, did not send. away away teams. Captain Kirk would leave the Enterprise,and go to the planet himself.”

As you note, the repetition of ‘Captain Kirk’, instead of using ‘he’ or changing the cadence of a sentence for interest, would go on and on with simple declarative sentences, using the term, ‘Captain Kirk’.

If there were fifty sentences, probably forty would have that name as the ‘Keyword’.

This attracted the A.I. but humans found this redundant.

However, to get human eyes one had to please the A.I.  One had to toss in those keywords as often as possible to get a high rating in a search engine.

Eventually, the ‘writers’ who belonged to the particular site stopped guessing and hooked into a ‘What’s Trending’  site so that they would know, before they did the first keystroke what they were to write about.

If ‘Usain Bolt’ was trending; the article would read; “All over the world people are interested in Usain Bolt.  Everyone wants to know about Usain Bolt.  I’m sure you are interested in Usain Bolt,”

If ‘Belly Dancers’ is trending, it is a simple ‘find and replace’.

As the A.I. counts the Keywords those items outrank all the valuable pieces that are posted about Usain Bolt or belly dancers.

Many sites, duped into believing that people want to read SEO rubbish will focus on the kind of trite and redundant item, and ignore the articles that people really do read.

Using this as a beard, Google implemented the Panda, making the public think it was tweaking so that the trite item would be downplayed and the good item promoted.

In reality, all Google wanted was to cause writing sites which paid its users to go out of business so its unpaid writing site would excel.

It didn’t work.  The unpaid site went into limbo, but the paying sites, being slapped down by the Rolling Panda lost half or more of their views, and one after another, shut their doors.

The way forward for sites is to comprehend that humans are not into SEO or keywords.  Humans want interesting topics well written.

People don’t want to lumber through a 500 word blah blah of redundancy which says nothing, and rather read what is sharp and to the point, and fills their interest.

What a computer thinks is good is contra that a human.