#AI-SEO

[seoseattle-vgiseo]

AI SEO Seattle - AI SEO Tools

#1 SEO company in Seattle would like to streamline your search for reliable AI. Our review of AI-SEO Tools contains some interesting findings. We invite you to check it out!

AI and Verti Group International a.k.a. SEO Seattle®

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[seo-changbinnies]

my favorite binnie looks (265/∞)

[prokopetz]

I suppose the thin silver lining to the discoverability of online resources going to shit because of SEO explotation is that all the folks who responded to reasonable questions with snarky "let me Google that for you" links which now lead to nothing but AI-generated gibberish look like real assholes now.

[aiweirdness]

Training large language models on the outputs of previous large language models leads to degraded results. As all the nuance and rough edges get smoothed away, the result is less diversity, more bias, and …jackrabbits?

[cocoonanagram]

I saw The Substance earlier today

[slitherpunk]

as someone who works on a lot of npc/enemy intelligence for her job i sure do hate how searching the keyword AI went from meaning stuff like pathfinding and behavior trees to just.. machine learning, chatgpt nonsense

[futurebird]

POTAATO

Oh wow someone (on Tumblr with four accounts) is selling (?) this clearly excellent guide to growing potatoes.

POTAATO

(wave it over the soil and coax the roots into existence. Then you have a plant. This plant will grow illogically. At some point it will send you an email. )

For some reason we're slowly replacing the whole internet with this.

This is being promoted on four different tumblr accounts.

www.tumblr.com/damasaknjigama

www.tumblr.com/littlestarwithoutsky16

www.tumblr.com/itsfazee

www.tumblr.com/yumitsukiyoru

Some of the images on these accounts are pure nightmare fuel:

everyone in unison: "Hello, Neighbor. Did you bring something to place in the HOLE?"

You did not bring anything. Silently you are handed a shovel. Time to make the hole bigger.

We've been having a lot of fun with this over on mastodon.

This is the BEST response ever. Perfect comment for this. No notes.

[elftwink]

hate when i google drug interactions and every website is like "uhm... doing dwugs is bad for you... evewy dwug has intwaction wisks... you just shouldn't combine any dwugs at all, just to be safe!" like. i AM aware all drugs have interaction risks. thats why im here instead of doing drugs currently. so can you just cut the shit and tell me whether this will make the medication ineffective or kill me

[whiskrs]

Do ya'll remember when you could go to that "advanced search" page on google? The page that looked like a library's search engine?

Did you know it still exists??? Cus I sure didn't! It's like it's its (its it's its for good measure) own webpage now, but she lives! You just have to search "google advanced search" and its the first result

Completely worthless info to me personally since I use duckduckgo or ecosia which you should too btw, but hey! Maybe that knowledge will help someone out there since AI SEO blah blah has razed the internet to the ground

[derkhue]

seo moonyeob 👿

[pink-yuri]

♡ Liar Satsuki Can See Death ♡

[yardsards]

search engines should have a feature where you can like, thumbs up or down individual search results, and that moves things up or down in the results list

[kraniumet]

I will not feed the discourse warriors 😌 but. genuinely an insane composition hang it in the met

[raomarketingpro]

Free AI Tools

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the way we work, learn, and create. With an ever-growing number of tools, it’s now easier than ever to integrate AI into your personal and professional life without spending a dime. Below, we’ll explore some of the best free AI tools across various categories, helping you boost productivity, enhance creativity, and automate mundane tasks.

Wanna know about free ai tools

1. Content Creation Tools

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

One of the most popular AI chatbots, ChatGPT, offers a free plan that allows users to generate ideas, write content, answer questions, and more. Its user-friendly interface makes it accessible for beginners and professionals alike.

Best For:

Writing articles, emails, and brainstorming ideas.

Limitations:

Free tier usage is capped; may require upgrading for heavy use.

Copy.ai

Copy.ai focuses on helping users craft engaging marketing copy, blog posts, and social media captions.

2. Image Generation Tools

DALL·EOpenAI’s DALL·E can generate stunning, AI-created artwork from text prompts. The free tier allows users to explore creative possibilities, from surreal art to photo-realistic images.

Craiyon (formerly DALL·E Mini)This free AI image generator is great for creating quick, fun illustrations. It’s entirely free but may not match the quality of professional tools.

3. Video Editing and Creation

Runway MLRunway ML offers free tools for video editing, including AI-based background removal, video enhancement, and even text-to-video capabilities.

Pictory.aiTurn scripts or blog posts into short, engaging videos with this free AI-powered tool. Pictory automates video creation, saving time for marketers and educators.

4. Productivity Tools

Notion AINotion's AI integration enhances the already powerful productivity app. It can help generate meeting notes, summarize documents, or draft content directly within your workspace.

Otter.aiOtter.ai is a fantastic tool for transcribing meetings, interviews, or lectures. It offers a free plan that covers up to 300 minutes of transcription monthly.

5. Coding and Data Analysis

GitHub Copilot (Free for Students)GitHub Copilot, powered by OpenAI, assists developers by suggesting code and speeding up development workflows. It’s free for students with GitHub’s education pack.

Google ColabGoogle’s free cloud-based platform for coding supports Python and is perfect for data science projects and machine learning experimentation.

6. Design and Presentation

Canva AICanva’s free tier includes AI-powered tools like Magic Resize and text-to-image generation, making it a top choice for creating professional presentations and graphics.

Beautiful.aiThis AI presentation tool helps users create visually appealing slides effortlessly, ideal for professionals preparing pitch decks or educational slides.

7. AI for Learning

Duolingo AIDuolingo now integrates AI to provide personalized feedback and adaptive lessons for language learners.

Khanmigo (from Khan Academy)This AI-powered tutor helps students with math problems and concepts in an interactive way. While still in limited rollout, it’s free for Khan Academy users.

Why Use Free AI Tools?

Free AI tools are perfect for testing the waters without financial commitments. They’re particularly valuable for:

Conclusion

AI tools are democratizing access to technology, allowing anyone to leverage advanced capabilities at no cost. Whether you’re a writer, designer, developer, or educator, there’s a free AI tool out there for you. Start experimenting today and unlock new possibilities!

4o

[yupyupppippi]

absolutely sick of hearing about AI. i know there are actual fantastic uses for tech that falls under the AI umbrella but i never even hear about it bc there's too much noise about scams, theft, bots, and the exponentially increased enshittification of formerly perfectly good products and services