[al_borland]

If their goal was to get more people to the site, and coming back to use it regularly… they’d make the site quick and easy to use with useful features.

Instead, they add all this stuff for SEO reasons. If they can be at the top of Google, they don’t have to worry about people coming back in their own, Google will keep sending them over.

In an age where few people use bookmarks anymore, many sites rely on SEO get regular traffic.

Then, of course, the other half is stuff to monetize the site. Ads, newsletter sign up modals, tracking cookies and the warnings that come with them, registration prompts, etc.

[ranger_danger]

> In an age where few people use bookmarks anymore, many sites rely on SEO get regular traffic.

I don't follow the logic here. Are you saying you believe that traffic to websites has significantly declined because they don't use bookmarks? But if they're searching for the site and click on it, that's still traffic to you either way. The alternative would be that they couldn't find it and gave up, which I also find unlikely if they were someone who already knew about it to begin with (as one of the "bookmark" people).

> If their goal was to get more people to the site, and coming back to use it regularly… they’d make the site quick and easy to use with useful features.

Are you sure that SEO doesn't derive WAY more traffic than a small optimized page? I think the vast majority of the world population simply doesn't care about that.

[al_borland]

My thought was that when people are looking for a recipe for apple pie, they aren't going to their favorite recipe website and searching for apple pie. They are going to google and typing in "apple pie recipe". Whatever site is on top is the one they go to. SEO wins out over a quality site a user wants to go back to. I'm pretty sure my dad has actually talked up a new dish he made for the holidays by saying it was the #1 result on Google for whatever the dish was. He equated being the top result with highest quality and best tasting.

This is my theory anyway, based on how I see people doing stuff these days. I don't have any hard data on this.

Without SEO, back in the era of bookmarks, I think people would bookmark sites they enjoyed using and wanted to come back to. If the site was hard to use and littered with ads, it wouldn't get bookmarked and get a repeat visit. At least that's how I did it. Maybe I'm not normal in that respect.