[malfist]

Ah yes, the good ol' days of content farms copying from stack overflow, or did you mean the good ol' days of buying back links? Or the good ol' days of web rings?

Let's face it, the heyday of honest results are just as mythical as the political "good ol' days".

[sph]

> the good ol' days of web rings

I honestly don't get your snark. Those were the good old days of the Internet, when SEO spam and PageRank wasn't a thing. Then Google came and made the Internet even better, then it turned to shit, and here we are. And web rings were great, you take that back.

So yes, there was a period of time when the Internet was in some ways better than nowadays. Now I'm not saying that everything that happened since is bad, but Internet search and signal-to-noise ratio has definitely fallen off a cliff.

Let's enjoy the good days of siloes and SEO optimization. I doubt it'll get better.

[strbean]

Eh, there were a few periods of "glory days". Usually in the months after Google's latest crackdown on one of the SEO techniques you mentioned.

[corrral]

Notably, around `08 or `09, these cycles stopped. From the outside, it looks like Google stopped trying to fight spam and just gave a bunch of huge sites a permanent boost in rankings instead, so at least some of your results might not be spammy garbage.

[naravara]

Also honest content moved into video and podcasting formats (that are harder to index) or inside walled gardens like Twitter or Facebook. It's like if the internet was a sea and Google was the ship used to navigate it, the water has dried up and now it's just craggy shoals we have to navigate around to get anywhere.