I still occasionally revisit old bookmarks out of habit.

Sometimes it’s muscle memory. A tech blog I used to read in university. A niche photography site that reviewed forgotten film cameras better than any magazine ever did.

An old forum run by one obsessive admin who somehow knew everything about CRT monitors, ThinkPads or Linux audio drivers. Sites built by people who clearly cared too much about very specific things.

And every now and then, I’ll click one of those links and feel that strange kind of digital grief.

Because the site is technically still there.

But it’s not really there anymore.

The domain survived. The soul didn’t.

The homepage now looks like every other SEO landfill on the internet. Generic WordPress template. Auto-generated stock images.

Articles about online casinos, crypto wallets, CBD gummies, AI trading bots or “best VPNs for streaming.” Sometimes the old logo is still sitting awkwardly at the top of the page like a gravestone nobody bothered removing.

You can almost see the layers of decomposition.

First the original owner stopped updating regularly. Then came a few guest posts. Then sponsored content. Then silence. Then eventually somebody bought the domain because it still had authority in Google Search.

And that’s how a beloved independent blog becomes part of a link scheme.

The internet became an extraction economy

What depresses me most about modern SEO culture is how thoroughly it transformed websites from places into assets.

That shift sounds subtle until you notice what disappeared alongside it.

There was a time when blogs felt personal. Even flawed sites carried identity. You could recognise writers by tone alone.

Entire corners of the web existed because somebody was deeply obsessed with a subject and wanted to document it publicly for no reason other than enthusiasm.

The internet used to reward curiosity.

Now it rewards scalability.

A huge chunk of the modern web exists primarily to manipulate search rankings, capture affiliate clicks or transfer authority between domains. Not to inform people. Not to entertain them. Not even necessarily to be read by humans.

Just to rank.

The terminology tells the story better than anything else. Old domains are now called “aged assets.” Articles are “content inventory.” Backlinks are “authority signals.” Entire businesses revolve around purchasing abandoned websites purely because Google still trusts them.

Not the writers. Not the communities. The domains.

That distinction changed the web more than most people realise.

The rise of the zombie website

One of the weirdest things about today’s internet is how many dead websites are still walking around pretending to be alive.

They haven’t disappeared. They’ve been repurposed.

Somebody buys an old gaming blog with strong backlinks from Reddit and tech publications. Suddenly it’s publishing articles about payday loans.

A once-respected travel site becomes an AI-generated crypto news machine. An abandoned design blog now exists solely to insert backlinks into barely readable listicles written by ChatGPT and edited by nobody.

You see this constantly once your brain learns the pattern.

The article titles feel algorithmically assembled. The writing says everything and nothing simultaneously. Paragraphs repeat the same concepts with slightly different wording.

Product reviews contain no evidence anybody touched the product. Entire sites feel like they were generated by machines attempting to imitate what a blog used to look like.

Because increasingly, they were.

Private Blog Networks — PBNs — industrialised this process years ago, but generative AI pushed it into overdrive. What once required teams of cheap freelance writers can now be automated at absurd scale.

One person with enough expired domains and enough automation tools can produce an entire ecosystem of fake publications in weeks.

And for a while, Google rewarded them for it.

Google accidentally incentivised the destruction of the independent web

This is the uncomfortable part people in the SEO industry rarely admit openly.

Google’s ranking systems spent years heavily rewarding domain authority and backlinks. Which meant older trusted websites had immense value even after the original creators disappeared.

The inevitable consequence was a market built around harvesting abandoned credibility. People began hunting for expired domains the way property investors hunt for undervalued real estate.

SEO forums became filled with discussions about backlink profiles, archive histories and domain trust scores. Entire marketplaces emerged around buying dead blogs with good search reputations.

The quality of the original publication stopped mattering.

All that mattered was whether Google still associated the domain with authority.

And once that happened, the internet quietly shifted from building things to exploiting leftovers.

Some of the most depressing examples are old enthusiast blogs that clearly once meant something to people.

You can still find traces of the original site buried underneath the spam if you dig through the archives. Old tutorials. Forum posts. Personal essays. Communities that once interacted daily.

Then suddenly there’s a hard pivot into casino SEO and AI-generated finance content.

It feels less like a business transition and more like grave robbing.

AI made an already bad internet feel empty

The arrival of generative AI didn’t create this problem. It amplified it so aggressively that the entire web started feeling synthetic almost overnight.

There’s a specific emotional flatness to AI-generated SEO content that becomes impossible to ignore once you notice it. Every sentence feels statistically assembled to resemble useful information without containing much actual experience or perspective.

The old internet was messy, biased and inconsistent. But at least it sounded human.

Now huge parts of the web read like autocomplete pretending to be expertise.

The saddest part is that AI content farms are often wearing the skins of websites that originally existed because somebody genuinely loved a topic.

Somebody spent years building trust and community around a niche interest. Then eventually the domain gets sold and flooded with synthetic sludge because its backlink profile still has commercial value.

It’s hard not to feel cynical watching that happen over and over again.

The web lost its weirdness

People often describe the old internet as more “authentic,” but I think the better word is weird.

The web used to contain far more eccentricity.

You’d find websites dedicated entirely to documenting subway announcements, repairing old synthesiaers or reviewing obscure Japanese flip phones.

People wrote 5,000-word posts because they were fascinated by something, not because Ahrefs or Semrush told them the keyword had traffic potential.

Modern publishing systems flattened a lot of that individuality into optimisation strategy.

Headlines became standardised. Formatting became standardised. Opinions became safer. Articles became designed around search snippets instead of actual reading experiences.

Entire sites began sounding interchangeable because they were all responding to the same algorithms.

The result is an internet that feels simultaneously larger and more lifeless.

There’s more content than ever. Less personality inside it.

Sometimes the old web still breaks through

Every so often, though, you still stumble across a genuinely personal site and immediately recognise the difference.

No aggressive popups. No SEO-bait headings every three paragraphs. No fake product reviews written for affiliate commissions. Just somebody sharing knowledge because they care about the subject.

Those sites feel almost shocking now.

Not because they’re extraordinary, necessarily. But because the modern web trained us to expect emptiness.

That’s probably the most depressing part of all this.

The internet didn’t merely lose good blogs. It lost the expectation that websites should feel human in the first place.