Morning,
I am really starting to dislike Google, but still find no better choice. :-)
Fairly recently they started supporting Structured Data
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data
Basically what this means is that you can, but don't have to, provide information in your web page that is there solely to help search engines understand your page.
If your page is naturally relevant and rare this is of limited benefit, for example if you are a taxidermist then you will be fine for searches like
taxidermist in <some town>.
For more general articles like cycling this data can be genuinely helpful to the search engine, but providing it takes time and the fact that you need to know that you can provide it and how to do so correctly.
So there is a risk that useful content created by people who aren't that into the tech side of things or have the time will drift down the rankings.
Sheldon Brown for example, there is a lot of useful info on that site, so there are a lot of pages to update but that is not their core business.
In many case the people most likely to have the resources and interest in providing this data are the ones with a lot of useless content but plenty of money.
Unfortunately sources with poor content seems to be dominating Google search rankings in many areas.
Google also seem to be struggling with computer generated text, it apparently looks good to the search engine but contains no information useful to human, there are of course a lot of adverts on sites that are based on this process.
There seems to be a feedback loop, Google ranks poor content highly, people click on it so Google serves it up again, leaving the well written articles on on page 5 of the results.
So it is the users fault, we should stop clicking on naff articles just so that we can mock them. :-)
