July 14, 2022
I think there is a solid normative case to be made against SEO (search engine optimization). Search engine optimization is essentially no different than this: let me parodically explain SEO to you.
Some website manager says: "Seeing as Google and other search engines index and rank sites roughly on the presence of relevant keywords, I will now append an ever–increasing list of random words to the end of every public post so that I might be picked up by more random Google searches no matter what they were originally searching for."
This sounds absurd, but I made a website once on a platform that offered SEO tools on its default creation toolkit, and what that consisted of was the exact thing I described above: add a list of random words to every article, that will be put on top of the stack of searchable keywords offered up to Google's search "crawlers".
Some of these so–called SEO experts are trying to convince gullible people that SEO is a "new type of writing" or a style of marketing writing, but this is not really the case. Of course, if your business is selling taro pudding it makes sense for your website to repeat the phrase taro pudding on your site as much as possible but that is nothing compared to appending the phrase "taro pudding" 1555 times in the page metadata - and that is a simple explanation of what SEO actually is.
What different perspectives say about SEO on the net is instructive. Current Affairs calls it the gentrification of the 'net. The Atlantic bemoans that Google is not what it used to be. Forbes says get on the SEO train or get lost. Basically SEO is a technique only those with riches can afford.
Of course effective SEO is a gray area even at its best. It's important to note that SEO has become a realm of contention, with Google and other search engines calling more and more of the tactics used by the SEO saboteurs "black hat" tactics. That's a callback to hacker culture where the legal hackers - for instance, penetration testers - are contrasted with the illegal hackers or "black hat" hackers. It's important to note however that nothing about SEO is illegal, but only against search engines' company guidelines. That said, since about four or five years ago it's been widely concluded that to have a successful website you need to have at least some SEO.
And this is basically wrong. It's a bloat on what should functionally be a very small skill of metadata manipulation, and it's an exploitation of the good faith assumption that most Google users would have, that generally speaking the ranking of search results should have a direct connection if only a tenuous connection to what was searched for. Some defenders of SEO would say "how much of an effect would it really have?" And argue that it's just a blip on the radar; a small anomaly in the results; glitches in the break. But this is grandiose, actually. Why? They are over estimating the skills they actually have and underestimating how easy they are for others to learn. The nerve that these people have to do this… And it's entirely false that these "skills" are being transferred to the other small sites. That's a lack of common sense, that lets you be seduced, by that excuse. What really happens, and what has actually happened, is that the large sites of rich companies, media moguls and so on, are now reinforced in their popularity by SEO because it costs them nearly nothing to get this minuscule skill set. Meanwhile, the middle class of websites fall, relative to the big sites, back into obscurity. These SEO people see themselves as these saboteurs "of everything!" and all that they end up doing is sycophantically serving concentrations of private power. We may not incorrectly say that part of the internet’s turn to the mainstream in recent years - much less quality indie music or indie style, for example; retro rehashes of aesthetics of punk, and 8-bit, and so on; retching all the way, hearing too much of the lie that these are fresh ideas and feelings when they are clearly the fashion cycle trying to subvert the internet's progress – has a lot of blame to be laid at the foot of these "SEO"… people. ಠ_ಠ
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