Noticing The Pattern

I'm not a writer by education. I pretty much hated creative writing classes when I was in school probably because I just wasn't very good at it in anyone's opinion. I think this is part of what made it difficult for me to figure out and explain to others (who also weren't writers nor English majors) what I had been seeing in my own search results for at least 2 years prior to 2022. I knew I was seeing something artificial and replicated, I think I just didn't have the relevant experience required to put the correct label on what I was noticing.

I kind of regret not ever making a list of pages and sites I was coming across that fit what I was calling "The Pattern". It was pretty rare that I stumbled onto them in my own non-work-related search results. I do, however, have a handful of links and notes I made trying to find someone, anyone else I worked with that could properly identify the things I was noticing and give them a better name than "The Pattern".

2022.09

homeblue.com/leaf-removal/wooster-oh-leaf-removal-cost.htm = a page that follows "The Pattern" or writing style/template that works, aggregate/network site probably not managed by the local biz

2022.10

moz.com/blog/niche-semantic-seo - "semantic seo" might be the term for "The Pattern" I've noticed in my own searches pulling up pages that I think are largely unhelpful for what I searched for - need to scroll thru 70 - 90% of the page text content before I can find out if they actually have a solution or answer for the tech issue/problem I was searching for.

The example screenshot of a page they have in that post shows "The Pattern" I've noticed before added below a product listings page. Here's a link to an archived page they took a screenshot of: "The Express Doors Direct French Doors Range" is the heading where "The Pattern" starts.

2023.01

searchenginejournal.com/word-count-seo-considerations/460556/ - It wasn't so very long ago that a "how to lower bounce rate" query would return page one results that talk about the importance of bounce rate for 700 words before even revealing the first tip on how to decrease it. <- I still encounter this kind of thing pretty regularly... part of "The Pattern" that google loves and I don't so much because, in my own search results at least, it's very unhelpful when I stumble onto it.

2025.10

It was and still is highly frustrating to me that the team I was part of wasn't able to decode "The Pattern" properly. I kept trying to figure it out on my own time and the more I read that seemed to be related to "The Pattern" it all seemed to just point to SEO content farms (aka SEO slop, search engine poisoning, etc.) in one way or another. This made sense to me because my own non-work-related results that pulled up web pages with "The Pattern" were absolute garbage but not all of my search results I thought were garbage necessarily matched "The Pattern" in my mind.

And once I connected the "content farm" dot it wasn't hard to figure that a lot of these cases of "The Pattern" I had been noticing for a few years were probably being generated by LLMs at this point because if you dig deep enough and long enough you can sometimes figure out what company or corporate entity the garbage content on small business websites originates from. That's how it was back then, at least. Today with "AI" tools and writers being baked in to every web tool from your web browser to your CMS even the guy that mows yards by day and updates his small business website and/or posts on social media in the evening has access to SEO content farm writers.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Think about just how much of this garbage low effort, low quality, generic, non-subject-matter-expert, SEO farm type garbage content was out there before ChatGPT and others became well-known to the general population. SEO content farms have been a thing probably from before 2009 when I started getting paid to build websites and people had been successfully finding ways to game or cheat search engines since at least the late 90s. Just think about all that garbage content out there that ChatGPT and others had to ingest as training data. One man's garbage is another's gold though. If everyone saw it as garbage like I do, well then we wouldn't be where we have been for many years when it comes to the enshittification of tech, the web in general, and search engines specifically here.

I've offended and/or upset people with the "garbage in = garbage out" adage a few times but it really is how everything works. Try cooking with rotten veggies and spoiled meat sometime. Or don't because that example should be pretty obvious for anyone with a few functioning brain cells of something not to do. If a journalist interviews unreliable sources their article will be misleading no matter how well it's written nor their good intentions. If content writers are not intentionally writing fiction then they are acting more as journalists than creative writers so should strive for accuracy and transparency IMHO.

It was around November of 2022 when I first made an account with an "AI" writing platform that didn't require me to give up my PII to start using it to "enhance" old blog post content (that I was lead to believe nobody spent more than 20 minutes researching and writing) because we simply didn't have a proper writer on the team, let alone subject matter experts on anything related to the wide variety of client websites' industries I had been looking at for the past year. By February 2023 I had seen very positive results of my old content "enhancement" effort in one case out of more than 50, but I wasn't able to replicate the same positive results in any other case, nor were my colleagues. Then in March of 2023 South Park released their ChatGPT episode. I already knew about OpenAI ("open" ha!) and had been playing around with other LLMs well before this point, but that episode made it clear to me that even the normies knew what it was by then - it had achieved enough name recognition in enough people well before Matt and Trey decided to make an episode about it.

What's Your Point?

I don't know. I want to get more of my knowledge and experiences documented for some reason and in the least in-genuine, most transparent way possible. I have tons of old notes I can go through to try and find interesting nuggets or whatever but it's a very tedious process sometimes because my notes files are only named with dates - and I have to recall some thing to search my notes files for that might have been interesting enough that I even made notes about it at one time or another to even begin the process.

I don't exactly like where we are today nor where we're headed when it comes to this stuff. It's been nothing but a steady decline in quality and I see zero signs that this process (or pattern?) will do anything other than accelerate.