@cobalt this is funny, but it's not necessarily an...

@cobalt this is funny, but it's not necessarily an AI content issue. Google is just shitty at spotlighting good content now. I had a site that benefited from that.

For over a year, an event page I setup to promote a performance for the 80's band "Flock of Seagulls" kept showing up in Google's highlighted results leading us to get a puzzling amount of traffic for a topic that was barely relevant to our site.

We weren't using AI content at all. We didn't do much more than post a stock press kit bio about the band plus a publicity photo they provided. I'm sure there were dozens of almost identical pages.

I guess I should pat myself on the back for nailing the SEO so that this could happen, but there's no way a page on a regional website using boilerplate content should have been ranking anywhere near the top 5 in North America on a search like this.

@TheBreadmonkey

Like 4 January at 10:51 | Wall-to-wall | Open on sfba.social

2 comments

jonathankoren™

@sysop408 @cobalt @TheBreadmonkey yeah. So many of these “trailers” are just fan edits from the previous films. It’s pretty common, and very annoying.

People have gotten so many brainworms, they call anything they don’t understand “AI fake”

4 January at 15:19 | Open on sfba.social

Mx Amber Alex

@sysop408 @cobalt @TheBreadmonkey but Google is to blame for their attempts to keep people on Google as much as possible and deprive websites of traffic by extracting all possible content from them and putting it into the search results.

When Google didn't try to be some sort of Wikipedia–Siri crossover, people had to actually click on those links and read them. So they've really brought this on themselves (and by extension, the users).

4 January at 20:59 | Open on eldritch.cafe