Around the same time I started working earnestly with using self-learning algorithms in the late 1990s, SEO “officially” became a thing.
Conceptually, I understood the potential benefits. However, I also understood the risks of using algorithms to search, sort, and control the dissemination of information. It is one of the reasons I thumb my nose at LinkedIn’s algorithmic attempt to limit the distribution of content by penalizing people for things like tagging or including necessary links in their posts. The one advantage I have is that I have been on LinkedIn since May 2007 and have worked very, very hard to build a community of purposeful dialogue versus likes alone. Some of my most “successful posts” have received only a handful of likes but 90 meaningful comments. I will take the comments every day and twice on Sunday over the snake oil incantations of how “You Too Can Become A LinkedIn SuperStar!”
I admire people like Jason, Busch, Michael Lamoureaux, and Duncan Jones, who speak their minds with the data to back them up rather than succumb to what’s popular versus practical. Unfortunately, there are not enough doing this in general.
“Google returned to federal court Monday over allegations the tech giant has manipulated the online advertising market, the latest antitrust suit against the company as the Justice Department pushes to break up parts of Google’s ad business. The DOJ and attorneys general from eight states are accusing Google of creating a monopoly on digital advertising by acquiring the tools used to buy, sell and display ads.” – Forbes Daily (September 10, 2024)
SEO Chickens Come Back To Rost
I will proceed to write this next part, assuming everyone understands the concept of data scraping.
In my early tech days, in the early 1980s, we didn’t call the gathering of useless and inaccurate information data scraping. Of course, we couldn’t because the Internet wasn’t yet a real thing. As an aside, to provide some context, in 1996, 45 million people were using the Internet. By the year 2000, that number had risen to 407 million users in 218 of the 246 countries in the world.
Back then, the funnels for capturing and sharing information were more primitive than they are today. However, unreliable information was still an issue on a much smaller scale, leading to the frequent use of the term garbage-in and garbage-out.
The advent of the Internet has enabled us to produce more garbage than we could in the past. GenAI has enabled us to create more sophisticated garbage and produce and disseminate it within milliseconds globally.
Based on the above, the landfill that is now the source of our intelligence means that data scraping is a much faster version of garbage-in, garbage-out!
“Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
As a result, critical thinking is even more important today than in years and decades past.
Forget SEO!
In late 2009, I began writing articles suggesting that SEO was a tool to game the system by creating text to get attention and “rise up” the Google rankings rather than sharing meaningful information and insight. In other words, write to get noticed rather than inform and empower the reader.
For me, the flashpoint was Google’s introduction of the Panda algorithm in February 2011. At that point, Internet content purposefully sacrificed accuracy for popularity and profit. It was the beginning of the numbing of critical thinking that, in many instances, has fuelled the “fake news” accusations being hurled by voices on the wrong side of the rotating table.
As a result, the process of data cleansing is equivalent to wearing knee-high boots to manually sift through the growing cesspool of BS or AI-powered SEO talk to recover the nuggets of real insights and knowledge.
Rob Handfield and Susan Walsh – and everyone committed to data accuracy and relevant application are the overworked filtration system that prevents us from turning off our brains and accepting whatever information the SEO gaming system deems “important.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
To start, it is critical thinking that will enable you to ferret the information source when they use words like:
- Futurist
- Content Creator
- Influencer
- And Above All – “SEO Anything”
Always scrutinize and, when necessary, challenge what you are reading—this includes the post I am writing today. If it is real and actual, it can and will withstand the most invasive and pervasive scrutiny and stand the test of time!
As for the procurement world, it is time to reclaim our content from PR-driven, marketing, and sales AI-contrived “native advertising” and finally figure out how to overcome the decades-long high rate of initiative failures. If we don’t, we will still be having this same discussion 10 to 15 years from now with nobody to blame but ourselves.
30
Procurement Insights
Why SEO is a detrimental hoax to justify control of the narrative on the Internet and its impact on GenAI Scraping
Posted on September 10, 2024
0
Around the same time I started working earnestly with using self-learning algorithms in the late 1990s, SEO “officially” became a thing.
Conceptually, I understood the potential benefits. However, I also understood the risks of using algorithms to search, sort, and control the dissemination of information. It is one of the reasons I thumb my nose at LinkedIn’s algorithmic attempt to limit the distribution of content by penalizing people for things like tagging or including necessary links in their posts. The one advantage I have is that I have been on LinkedIn since May 2007 and have worked very, very hard to build a community of purposeful dialogue versus likes alone. Some of my most “successful posts” have received only a handful of likes but 90 meaningful comments. I will take the comments every day and twice on Sunday over the snake oil incantations of how “You Too Can Become A LinkedIn SuperStar!”
I admire people like Jason, Busch, Michael Lamoureaux, and Duncan Jones, who speak their minds with the data to back them up rather than succumb to what’s popular versus practical. Unfortunately, there are not enough doing this in general.
“Google returned to federal court Monday over allegations the tech giant has manipulated the online advertising market, the latest antitrust suit against the company as the Justice Department pushes to break up parts of Google’s ad business. The DOJ and attorneys general from eight states are accusing Google of creating a monopoly on digital advertising by acquiring the tools used to buy, sell and display ads.” – Forbes Daily (September 10, 2024)
SEO Chickens Come Back To Rost
I will proceed to write this next part, assuming everyone understands the concept of data scraping.
In my early tech days, in the early 1980s, we didn’t call the gathering of useless and inaccurate information data scraping. Of course, we couldn’t because the Internet wasn’t yet a real thing. As an aside, to provide some context, in 1996, 45 million people were using the Internet. By the year 2000, that number had risen to 407 million users in 218 of the 246 countries in the world.
Back then, the funnels for capturing and sharing information were more primitive than they are today. However, unreliable information was still an issue on a much smaller scale, leading to the frequent use of the term garbage-in and garbage-out.
The advent of the Internet has enabled us to produce more garbage than we could in the past. GenAI has enabled us to create more sophisticated garbage and produce and disseminate it within milliseconds globally.
Based on the above, the landfill that is now the source of our intelligence means that data scraping is a much faster version of garbage-in, garbage-out!
“Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
As a result, critical thinking is even more important today than in years and decades past.
Forget SEO!
In late 2009, I began writing articles suggesting that SEO was a tool to game the system by creating text to get attention and “rise up” the Google rankings rather than sharing meaningful information and insight. In other words, write to get noticed rather than inform and empower the reader.
For me, the flashpoint was Google’s introduction of the Panda algorithm in February 2011. At that point, Internet content purposefully sacrificed accuracy for popularity and profit. It was the beginning of the numbing of critical thinking that, in many instances, has fuelled the “fake news” accusations being hurled by voices on the wrong side of the rotating table.
As a result, the process of data cleansing is equivalent to wearing knee-high boots to manually sift through the growing cesspool of BS or AI-powered SEO talk to recover the nuggets of real insights and knowledge.
Rob Handfield and Susan Walsh – and everyone committed to data accuracy and relevant application are the overworked filtration system that prevents us from turning off our brains and accepting whatever information the SEO gaming system deems “important.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
To start, it is critical thinking that will enable you to ferret the information source when they use words like:
Always scrutinize and, when necessary, challenge what you are reading—this includes the post I am writing today. If it is real and actual, it can and will withstand the most invasive and pervasive scrutiny and stand the test of time!
As for the procurement world, it is time to reclaim our content from PR-driven, marketing, and sales AI-contrived “native advertising” and finally figure out how to overcome the decades-long high rate of initiative failures. If we don’t, we will still be having this same discussion 10 to 15 years from now with nobody to blame but ourselves.
30
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