• Neato@ttrpg.network
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    8 months ago

    So pages are just including every relevant term hidden somewhere like they making resumes in the early aughts with 4pt white text with bullshit at the bottom?

    • underisk@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      A popular SEO trick around 15 years ago was to put a bunch of search terms in a heading tag near the top of your page markup and just style it to minimize its appearance, because if you completely hid it google would penalize your pagerank score. They test for visibility but it’s difficult to do so in a foolproof and futureproof way so there’s likely a similar technique still seeing some limited use today.

      It’s far less effective or straightforward than the modern prevailing SEO strategy; which is using generative AI that have been trained on all the top-ranked pages to produce exactly what google likes and ranks highly. Which has a knock-on effect of causing all these AIs to start eating themselves by training on pages produced by AI, like a kind of human-centipede ouroboros.