I hate SEO.
I want to learn more about dinosaurs in Colorado because I am a smart interesting grown-up who has a favorite dinosaur (ok I lied, I have many favorite dinosaurs). So I ran an internet search for "dinosaurs of colorado". I use DuckDuckGo to stay out of google's grubby hands.
Half of the hits were for museums, cultural institutions, and tourism pages of various parks and municipalities in Colorado. I'm not too annoyed by that - I want people to visit museums and cultural institutions. They're ok, but many of them exist principally to get people to come visit them. The information they have is good, but relatively shallow. Still, they are infinitely better than the other half of the hits.
The other hits were mostly listicles. The 10 coolest dinosaurs of colorado. The 10 best places to see dinosaurs in colorado. You have to visit this dinosaur attraction in colorado. A dinsoaur lover's guide to colorado. They have their purpose, but it's clear that they are aggregating and they are just clearing houses for the barest surface level information. They have at best a paragraph about the sites and/or dinosaurs which they are written about. I scrolled down and down and down looking for something that I wasn't finding. Because I am old enough to remember the early days of the internet. When the encyclopedia brittanica sat cheek by jowl with a page that was bright enough you could use it to signal plane landings and a page that would slag your computer if you clicked anywhere on it and a page that was formatted just...just so badly but had the best information about exactly what you were looking for written by a paleontologist who just thought HTML was kinda neat. I'm sure those pages still exist. And I don't want to be too harsh on the modern pages - there are bright spots; the national parks pages are reliable, wikipedia is an oasis, museums usually have decent resources, and even those listicles can be useful when I'm looking for dinosaur recommendations of a weekend.
But the SEO doesn't favor the little pages. The weird pages. The odd little character actors of pages who do one things better than everyone else and show up in odd places, never quite the starring role, but always welcome. Places like tumblr have our locals who count t's or identify cars, but they won't ever show up in a standard search on a search engine. They aren't optimized.
And I miss them. I've been picking away at a neocities page, not making much progress because I didn't have a direction. But now I think I do. I want to be a character. I want to know about dinosaurs, and share my love of them with someone.
