Exactly. The root of the problem is that Google is simultaneously a search engine and the largest ads provider for the internet. Google has a vested interest in showing you search results that have the most ads on their websites. I'm not saying they're propping up results directly that have more ads; but I'm saying there is a correlation between websites with aggressive SEO and a high number of ads. Where Google would, in the past, change their algorithm to lower the ranking of websites with clearly aggressive SEO (it's not even that hard to detect when someone is trying to game the system.), I speculate that because of this correlation with ads, they've reverted.
So instead of getting a website that's a page of text and images hosted on someone's home server somewhere that tells you exactly what you need to know in a clean way, you only get articles mass-produced by some "writer" somewhere (he's probably verified on Twitter, though), whose sole job is to write these horrible articles scavenging a minute amount of information from another website to fit in somewhere, mostly just so they have a vessel to attach their SEO onto.
The sad thing is that this minute amount of information they scavenge for now often comes from other articles written like this because they're what appears on Google for the "writers", so it's a huge feedback loop.
What ends up happening is you'll have one decent piece of advice for the problem you're searching for that will be the basis for all of the top search results, where the articles take that brief piece of advice and reword it, surrounding it in ads, and repeating the search query they're targeting over and over within their article.
Exactly. The root of the problem is that Google is simultaneously a search engine and the largest ads provider for the internet. Google has a vested interest in showing you search results that have the most ads on their websites. I'm not saying they're propping up results directly that have more ads; but I'm saying there is a correlation between websites with aggressive SEO and a high number of ads. Where Google would, in the past, change their algorithm to lower the ranking of websites with clearly aggressive SEO (it's not even that hard to detect when someone is trying to game the system.), I speculate that because of this correlation with ads, they've reverted.
So instead of getting a website that's a page of text and images hosted on someone's home server somewhere that tells you exactly what you need to know in a clean way, you only get articles mass-produced by some "writer" somewhere (he's probably verified on Twitter, though), whose sole job is to write these horrible articles scavenging a minute amount of information from another website to fit in somewhere, mostly just so they have a vessel to attach their SEO onto.
The sad thing is that this minute amount of information they scavenge for now often comes from other articles written like this because they're what appears on Google for the "writers", so it's a huge feedback loop.
What ends up happening is you'll have one decent piece of advice for the problem you're searching for that will be the basis for all of the top search results, where the articles take that brief piece of advice and reword it, surrounding it in ads, and repeating the search query they're targeting over and over within their article.