Hacker News Reader

Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

I remember a time when it was actually possible to rank on the top 3 by writing quality content on your own blog.

But then I remember Google giving "trusted" domains such as digg and reddit extra weight and it was quite depressing seeing the top result for the exact title of one of my blog posts going to the digg and reddit page that merely pointed to my article.

Nowadays it seems practically impossible to get good rankings even for unique phrases and you have to buy advertising and backlink services unless you want to wait 2-3 years. And a lot of blog posts here automatically get accusations of blog-spam even though some of them actually aren't.

View on HN

That's still possible. At least if Wikipedia doesn't have an article on it.

Google results aren't static, so you may see something different, but when I search for /dev/urandom, I get the German and English Wikipedia first (getting past that is nigh impossible, reddit is nothing compared to that), then my essay, then(!) the man page, then tptacek's blog post, then one of Pornin's fantastic Stackexchange answers.

Actually, digg and reddit don't feature anywhere in the first twenty results.

It is still possible but it is very difficult.

Google will show results by changing the ranks a little bit for random people to see which one has better CTR but mostly they are unchanged. It also probably knows that you would prefer your essay so it shows it higher than normal.

And digg/reddit/hn results were manually de-emphasized by a google update, I think it might have been the Panda update or before that, so starting a link aggregator is also much harder than before.

Google has given these websites a free moat.

From personal experience, creating content now is 20% creation, 80% promotion.

This is off putting to most content creators.

The internet went from a world of content creators to a world of salesmen.

Sounds a bit like the US, which went from a nation of inventors to a nation of salesmen.

Your comment has me interested. What years are you describing?

Any time before 2007-2008, not sure the exact year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com