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Comment by sixhobbits | Hacker News Reader

You can keep trying to hack Google all you want, and you can definitely be successful for short periods of time if you invest enough time and money. But there's also the difficult but straight forward way out -- write content that people want to read.

Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, and others have adopted this strategy with great success. Writing good quality content takes time, good copywriters, subject experts, editors, and designers. It's not easy. It's not a hack. But you can bet it will outrank any cheap hacks for the foreseeable future.

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Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, and others have adopted this strategy with great success

This is a confirmation bias, however. There are a lot of orgs trying the same strategy to absolutely no success, great content that doesn't have the social proof rotting away in obscurity.

Even among the ones who yield success, that tends to come and go. It's a very short path between "wow great content" and content that is cynically (and sometimes accurately) seen as a thin veneer over self-promotion.

There was a period when Netflix, for instance, had tech pieces on here constantly. The crowd lost interest. They're still pumping out the content, presumably at a significant manpower cost, to seemingly little readership.

Would you mind to link some of these quality articles of not so successful companies? Maybe HN crowd would bring them some of the deserved success.

At Netflix's level, the tech blog content shifted from being content marketing to content recruiting.

At scale, recruiting is often about marketing. It's about conveying a compelling story that pulls people in.

I run a content marketing agency. The problem you're talking about is, indeed, a massive one. But that usually happens when companies create content without thinking about its distribution.

While you certainly must create content that your audience wants to read, it is even more important that you have a clear plan for distributing it. If your content isn't supported by a strong SEO plan, and if you don't have a clear social media and PR strategy for it, you won't see results, no matter how good the content is.

Isn’t distribution of content is like just posting what you wrote on reddit or on HN nowadays?

Way more than that. It's a combination of SEO + PR + social media. So you'd have some content that other sites might be willing to publish or link to (say, in a weekly "best of" roundup). Some other content that would focus purely on keywords supported by a backlinking campaign to rank well in search engines. And some other content that would focus on topics that would resonate with, say, the HN crowd.

Yep, don't forget to do the marketing for your marketing.

Ah this takes me back to the ol'days: content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.

There is another strategy that doesn't need high quality content. Companies like Zapier created thousands of pages with little variations following the rule of "how to integrate X with Y".

They also did a lot of work to make it appear that these pages were bespoke, even if they were autogenerated. A nontrivial accomplishment.

Like all those "how to resolve missing xyz.dll driver" autogenerated pages?

Those pages are the worst. They were everywhere in SERP in the late 2000s, and I still a few today. "Alternative to [software name]" type searches bring those pages out in hordes.

It is so obvious they are auto-generated, do people still fall for them?

To be fair, that’s essentially what this article is saying, particularly the parts about Google now being able to track engagement and thus using that signal to boost results rather than just backlinks or domain rank.

I think Google these days link the information they get from Google Analytics and their DNS service requests to boost some domains and links over the others.

Good content is one part.

Amplification (getting your content out) is the other part, and unless you've got an audience already, it's even more time consuming than preparing the actual content.

Not if you r niche is too small for Google to recognize

If there was any niche too small for Google search to recognize, Google search wouldn't be Google search.

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