[endothrowho333]

That marketing babble is there for the same reason the majority of YouTube videos are >10 minutes and filled with the same filler: Google's ranking algorithm.

For YouTube videos it's mean watch time. Filler babble pumps up those numbers.

For Google, it's mean read time. Filler babble also pumps up this number. However, it also ranks higher directly because it's considered a "long form" piece instead of a soundbite, and because it's more unique than similar pages (f.e compare all news outlets covering the same story -- it's all relatively the same).

Blame Google, for its algorithms that are directly shaping our communications and culture. Hell, blame all tech companies that use algorithms to determine culture (see: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, and yes, HN). Whether this is good or bad, is someone else's argument to write.

Mozilla, and every other website owner, must play the game in order to drive organic traffic to its pages through search engine optimization. Otherwise, you might not be reading this article right now, and it would be solely shared by word-of-mouth from people who check the site or are on a newsletter.

[psv1]

> Blame Google, for its algorithms that are directly shaping our communications and culture. Hell, blame all tech companies that use algorithms to determine culture

> Mozilla, and every other website owner, must play the game

No. Mozilla and every other contributor still have a responsibility for what they put out there. Google and Facebook messing up the overall environment doesn't let individual contributors off the hook.

[endothrowho333]

Hating the game vs. hating the player.

We all have to do things in our own self-interest, especially when there are higher powers bearing down upon us.

They're not off the hook, but they're not the biggest fish that needs to be fried. Going after them won't solve anything except the need to vent one's own emotions.

The cycle will continue to repeat for other websites and other people. We've established that it happens often, and we've even established the root cause. Idling on "who's at fault and what should their punishment be" is just that: idling.

[acephal]

Severely off-topic but this is also how I feel about battling racism in America, but the general notion of systems vs specific agents was strongly reinforced for me by the Slovenian political writer Slavoj Zizek in a book of his after 9/11 wherein he remarks that Left politics were becoming more and more about targeting specific agents when the processes that motivate and constrain those agents (as well as our own) are so much more anonymous that its difficult for people to even parse the significance of.

[boernard]

I doubt that Mozilla needs this page to be ranked high, it's more of a press release and not a landing page that should come up high in search results when you search for Firefox...

[endothrowho333]

Ranking individual pages is vitally important in the website traffic game.

Suppose Mozilla's goal for its blog is to generate a lot of organic traffic so that people are aware of Moz Corp's continuing development efforts. If that were the case, individual ranking of pages matters.

A domain name has a certain "rank," that's based entirely on on-page SEO -- or all of the indexed pages and site as a whole -- and off-page SEO -- or all of the domains and pages that link to it.

One of the algos in determining on-page SEO is cumulative ranking of all pages under that domain. That is, a single page's ranking is not an isolated variable based purely on that page and its content alone. The other pages that fall under that same domain impact every other page on said domain.

If Mozilla published a poorly SEO'ed blog article, that would negatively affect the ranking of all other articles under the blog.mozilla.org name -- and more severely any other pages that link to it or are linked inside of it.

That's only the first part. Suppose they wanted to generate traffic for this individual press release? Then that's a whole nother ball of wax.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

They could put the actual content in understandable form at the top, and leave the page of marketing babble for after.

[endothrowho333]

Google crawlers treat the first few paragraphs as an abstract, and weigh it heavier than the sections that follow after.

The balance between SEO and readability has already been struck, and an equilibrium has been reached. Changes will only happen when Google ships out new major algorithm changes. They're relatively often though, and always shake up the field.

If people were really interested in fixing this problem, they would start writing and campaigning for more transparency and democracy from Google. Do you think that would affect their own rankings? ;) Rhetorical question.

[carlob]

> the majority of YouTube videos are >10 minutes and filled with the same filler: Google's ranking algorithm.

Ironically now sometimes google shows video results suggesting to skip the first few seconds. I swear I've seen it a few times, but maybe I was being A/B tested

[wsgeorge]

Also seen it when searching for some how-tos. More than a few times. I thought it was brilliant, but now that you mention it: why doesn't this show up more often?