The Depression of All Star Novelty Content out ranking quality.

[Brett_Tabke]

You spend days working on just the perfect piece of content.
You are positive it is going to do great.
You launch and then get ... nada, nothing months.

Then Friday at 4:55pm you spend two minutes and spew out a novelty post that becomes the highest traffic page on the site for the year. Here that below: (10s of thousands of referrals...argh!)
[searchengineworld.com...]

It's honestly, kinda depressing to think that. I mean, what's the flipping point of working on quality content if this crap is going to rank.

[graeme_p]

I agree, but its more something that is wrong with the world than just the web.

Back in the days of paper magazines celeb and lifestyle stuff hugely outsold serious news, analysis, science, humanities ones etc.

[tangor]

That was back in the days! Celeb and Lifestyle are not the same (or as appealing!)

[thecoalman]

On my forum there is lot of DIY types, mechanics and even a few engineers. In the off topic section I have a lot of topics that rank very well where they discuss home projects. 9 and 10 of the top Google search queries are off topic results.

I got an email once from the makers of one product where it was ranking well but tthe suggestion for it's use was actually illegal and I removed it.

Another topic was negative review of gold seller that was advertising on TV, it was like the 4h or 5th result for their name. How or why is baffling to be honest. I received an email from "Joe" offering $500 for it's removal which I declined. Coincidentally two massive DDOS attacks shortly after. The first one was on average about 2000 requests per second.

[Key_Master]

Content is dead thanks to our AI overlords. Ranking has little to do with content. It's always been a popularity contest. Guess who is most popular? The search engine.

Nowadays, I see little point in feeding quality content to a search engine only to have it regurgitate it back for its own profit. It will only get worse as AI improves. I'm actually surprised this site doesn't have a forum dedicated to AI. I can think of no greater threat to site builders. But for now, it's a tool that can work both ways.

[not2easy]

I'm actually surprised this site doesn't have a forum dedicated to AI.

Oh, but we do - the SearchGPT, ChatGPT, and AI Topics forum is here: [webmasterworld.com...] (since 2023)

[Key_Master]

I mean a real AI forum. Not ones catered to specific search or AI products. Search is dying. In ten years, search as we know and the advertising income that comes with it will be long gone. AI models is the future and everyone will have at least one of their own.

[tangor]

Public search, aka what has been, is on short time since the advent of AI and voice search (natural queries) is on the rise. But "search" itself, the ENGINE that finds all the data, that's not going away anytime soon. What IS going away is webmaster ability to steer, nudge, or fudge search engines since they are not even giving lip service to site level signals. The mechanics of search will remain largely unchanged, just not open faced to the user as of old and not easily gamed. AI (ChatGPT, Grok, CoPilot, etc.) will be the interface and---sadly---webmasters get the short stick from here on out.

Meanwhile, back to the OP's lament that novelty krap outshines quality content, just remember:

You can't fix stupid.

[graeme_p]

@Key_Master the forum title says "and AI Topics" so it is general.

@tangor agreed with "you can't fix stupid"