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Comment by XCSme | Hacker News Reader

Don't waste your time reading this article, it just mentions random points about how to have a functional web app, plus in a perfect world SEO should not exist, it's the Search Engine's job to find the content and show the user the content he is looking for, not the developers. I shouldn't have to add "hacks" in my code for the Google Crawler to understand my site the same way users already do.

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Eh, not sure I'd say SEO shouldn't exist. At least, the techniques used for it are all things that should be the expected default on every site, like having a logical HTML structure with heading tags, having a useful unique title for every page, having a description shown in listings, logically linking to relevant content, rendering the page on the server rather than the client, etc.

Maybe black hat/spammy SEO shouldn't exist, but at a certain level, good SEO is basically just about designing a good product and marketing it well.

Agreed. A lot of the "good" stuff you can do for SEO nowadays is pretty close to "stuff you should be doing anyway" for accessibility, usability, etc.

I agree with doing SEO as of implenting stuff the way it should be implemented (use tags as they were supposed to do, add rich snippets for ratings and prices), but not with stuff done purely to optimize for a search engine. As I said, the article doesn't mention any real SEO techniques, but only good practices that should be known by any junior web dev (site should load fast, use a CDN, mind the cache, etc.)

Agreed, but it’s not a perfect world and those who take into account that headings, structured data, ordered lists, internal linking structure, etc have positive benefits and rewarded by Google will prosper...until the day that Google’s algo is sophisticated enough to not need those anymore.

Get off your high hirse mate

yes comes across as a lazy developer and not in a good way.

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