Is there anybody out there?

The more time I spend learning about SEO, the more I'm convinced that the dead internet theory is real.

Wikipedia calls the dead Internet theory "a conspiracy theory which asserts that since around 2016 the Internet has consisted mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, as part of a coordinated and intentional effort to control the population and minimize organic human activity."

I think it's simpler and less nefarious than that. The Internet is dead because of incentives. The lure of free traffic (and the potential money you can make from those people) from any number of ginormous internet platforms (Google, Reddit, Facebook, Tiktok, etc) is too tempting for people not to game the system. The goal of the platforms is mass reach, and so people create content to get mass reach. And some people go to great lengths to do so.

My unscientific guess is that 90% of internet content is bot / automated now, if not more.

Here's just some examples I've come across this week.

People bragging about fake reddit accounts

Here's a tweet about buying up reddit accounts for marketing purposes:

"Should I buy a high-karma Reddit account to advertise my business?"

The main benefit of buying an aged high-karma account:

You get access to more exclusive subreddits right away that normally have restrictions on lower karma or new accounts.

Higher karma Reddit accounts definitely look more trustworthy and are more likely to be taken seriously by readers.

You can purchase aged high-karma accounts from sellers on BlackHatWorld or other online marketplaces.

And here's a response to that tweet, this person brags about owning 100+ accounts and using them to post comments for customers:

Been building a syndicated network of accounts for a year now - up to 100 + 2-8 year old accounts w/ 10k+ karma commenting and posting for out [sp] customers. The time has come 😀

Multiply that by the number of people who AREN'T bragging about doing that. How much of what you see on Reddit is real?

If you dig a little deeper, you'll find that the main reason people are doing this is to rank higher on Google. It's well known that Google is prioritizing Reddit in its search results. So people buy reddit accounts to make fake comments promoting their business on Reddit in hopes that they will end up in the Google search results.

Blog Spam

One of the main things that's gotten me depressed about this is getting up close and personal with the amount of blog spam out there.

Traditional SEO advice is to create content about the subject you want to rank for, and then go out and promote that content to other bloggers and publishers with the hopes that they will link to it. Backlinks are a sign to Google that your content is valuable, and that will boost your own site in Google's search results.

So that's what I've been trying to do.

Earlier this year, I went looking for parenting blogs to share ColorBliss with. Parents are a natural customer for ColorBliss, and the first persona I built it for.

What I found was just a bunch of phantom parenting blogs. I had a list of 100 or so, and most of them were no longer publishing. They all just seemed to stop a few years back.

That was depressing both because it made it hard to do outreach and also because it just meant that there were so many fewer people writing about their experiences and sharing them in long form.

But I've kept on trying to do outreach. This week, I've been investigating the backlink strategy of some of my competitors. They have a lot of backlinks from sites that Ahrefs says have a high domain rating (a measure of how authoritative Google would see the site).

However, when I go to investigate the posts, they are all AI-generated articles about "best [insert keyword here]", that no person actually wants to read. The sites have high domain rating, but each of the articles is either explicitly or obviously written by AI and none of the articles receives traffic from Google or other search engines (according to Ahrefs at least).

Here's one (you can tell it's AI because it says "Unleashing" and also because of how boring that intro is.)

Here's another one that purports to be by the actor Tom Hardy, but says that it is AI generated.

Here's what they all look like in Ahrefs: Decent to Good DR, zero backlinks, zero traffic, zero keywords

Another article was about the "Top 5 Coloring Pages for Kids". As if that ranking makes sense at all.

I came across dozens of these articles in 30 minutes of searching, and this niche is relatively small in terms of market size. Think about how much of this is going on at scale. When I do it depresses me.

Anecdotal Evidence on Social Media

Lots of people are using AI-generated replies on social media in an effort to get visibility without real connection.

Here's a sad but true example of one gone wrong:

That looks like an account made to promote a service that makes AI-powered smart replies - the tag line is a sad exercise in oxymoron:

Engage authentically with your target audience using AI-powered smart replies. Build meaningful connections and grow your following organically.

But it doesn't seem to occur to people that when you use these, you completely tank your own self-respect. Or it does occur, and people think that the tradeoff in visibility is worth it.

End of Rant

This whole thing has been weighing kind of heavy on me this week, and with some bad sleep last night I felt like it would feel good to get off my chest, even if there is nobody else out there. If you are a real person and are reading this, maybe send me a note at ben at robertson dot is. I'd love to connect with you and make a plan to preserve a corner of the Internet that is alive, if not thriving.

I'm also really interested in people doing marketing online that is authentic. Hit me up please, or send me your best resources!