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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always wanted to see a search engine thar takes the top SEO tips and penalizes sites that use them.

For example searching for how to grow a garden. I never want to see howtogrowagarden.com. I’d prefer to find more genuine l, non seo juiced advice.

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Problem is that SEO is tied to appearing relevant, so to penalize SEO is to penalize relevancy. Splitting SEO from relevancy is often a matter of making better search

Searching for least-relevant can be pretty random: it's easy to point at the center of a circle, but the edge of the circle is not a point

A perfect system would penalize SEO (appearing relevant) and reward actual relevance. Of course, this is easier said than done.

This is exactly what the search engines have been attempting for the last 10 years.

by your own words, since SEO is tied to appearing relevant, penalizing SEO peanlizes apparent relevancy.

and since SEO is abused for pageviews i.e. apparent relevancy, this penalizes SEO abuse.

The whole reason google spends billions on their search engine is that humanity does not yet have a program that can differentiate fake relevancy from relevancy, with perfect accuracy.

The venn diagram between SEO and user satisfaction is gradually being compressed into a circle by Google as they improve their algorithm.

SEO is already basically human oriented now- anyone selling mumbo jumbo SEO magic now is a crank. It used to actually work quite well.

Many SEO tips, like using H1 tags, make the site more usable IMO. I imagine removing the top million leaves you with some pretty ugly sites.

I’d like to remove just the top 10K or 100K.

It looks like they already have an option for that.

An approach I've thought of in the past would be to prioritize sites with fewer scripts and smaller stylesheets. Lots of .edu pages fit the bill

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