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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily disagree for many startups, but his example is poor. The TripAdvisor site is a better result for the reason Google featured it in the SERP--user reviews. Oyster's page is a review by one person versus TripAdvisor's 171 reviews. TripAdvisor's page is also much older, dating back to at least October 2003 when the first review was posted. Oyster was started in June 2009, which is pretty recent in the scheme of things. I'd say they are doing pretty well to rank where they do considering.

FWIW the top results are also all Four Season's actual site, which is what it should be.

SEO is tough in the web app market, but if you're a content based website, SEO was and still is a very viable strategy. Look at Stack Overflow for an example.

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SEO is tough in the web app market, but if you're a content based website

There is no rule that says you can't sell a web application with a content-based website. I mean, if you're using AdWords, you're essentially outsourcing the production of content leading into your landing pages to the more efficient content farms, who will get X level of results with pages tangentially related to your product festooned with ads (including your's and competitors'). Why not write the content yourself, make the quality a few notches above "How To Boil Water", leave off the competition's ads, and pay for the content once as opposed to leasing traffic from it monthly?

I was just about to comment and say the same thing, using Bingo Card Creator as an example, then I noticed who made this comment :)

Thanks for blogging Patrick, it's a great resource for the rest of us.

Stack Overflow didn't bootstrap to viability off Google traffic. The other guy brought Joel onboard to get his audience, no? Which is not to be critical of Stack Overflow, but it's a bad example, not the least because Google had to manually intervene to solve its SEO issues.

> It's also a bad example because Google had to manually intervene to solve their SEO problems.

That was kind of my point--SEO makes a huge difference in the content business. They got beat with their own content!

I think that supports Chris' point. He isn't saying SEO doesn't matter, he's saying that pursuing SEO as a marketing strategy means you have to be very aggressive in order to get any traffic. Which makes it a non-viable strategy for startups that care about the user experience.

My personal experience says he's right. And I think the Stack Overflow example does too. Even when SO redesigned itself to make the site more SEO-friendly it couldn't compete with some of its imitators -- presumably because Joel and team were averse to making changes that would hurt site usability and aesthetics.

> He isn't saying SEO doesn't matter, he's saying that pursuing SEO as a marketing strategy means you have to be very aggressive in order to get any traffic

SO got very significant search traffic with little apparent effort (that may be too harsh, but they were certainly not very aggressive).

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the...

This was before they made updates to deal with people out working them and at the time they were getting 83% of all their traffic from Google.

It's probably fairer to say that Joel solved the chicken-egg problem by leveraging his existing community and fanning antipathy against experts-exchange. If the model was primarily SEO I'd expect them to have an easier time bootstrapping their non-tech related communities, especially now that they're investment-backed and can put money into user acquisition:

http://gaming.stackexchange.com http://cooking.stackexchange.com

All that said, I appreciate the thoughtful reply. It's rare for people to link to supporting data like this. And maybe you're right! Upvoted.

Might not be the best example - but I think my overall point stands.

Isn't this always the case? Startups exploit media or approaches that are new, overlooked, or both. If they weren't doing something odd they wouldn't be startups.

When they succeed, that focuses attention on the new media and techniques, and leads to crowded fields. Then the next generation has to come up with something else. Groupon did not grow on the back of SEO. It grew on a combination of Facebook, Twitter, cold-calls and good old-fashioned copywriting.

It may still be possible to succeed using some overlooked wrinkle of SEO, or SEO plus something else. It's even more likely to happen if everyone takes your advice to ignore SEO... except the one startup that doesn't.

I don't. Excuse the cynicism but it sounds to me like you're complaining. Did you happen to be involved in a start-up that isn't doing so hot and you believe Google is to blame?

Sorry but just because this is the internet doesn't mean real world business rules don't apply. There is a difference between form and content. Your only reasons for preferring Oyster over TripAdvisor is that the page is cleaner and there are less ads? Ummm if you had actually used the two services it would become clear that TripAdvisor has better content. And again, just because this is the internet doesn't mean that there is no barrier to entry. Think about the search engine market, the social networking market, the audio statistics market (c.f. the totally off Last.fm article also curretly on the front page). Try displacing those guys.

Point is, if Oyster in fact proves to be a superior website in the long run, it will hopefully (and probably) get its due. But to expect an algorithmic search engine to order results based on hope is just... wrong.

re: links, have you heard of Mint.com? Check out their infographics as and example of aggressive, but high quality and legit link building. The one they did about 'how big is a trillion?' got hundreds of links. Here's another peice of brilliant link bait: http://feefighters.com/paypal-calculator.

If you think only black hat link builders can move the needle, you aren't meeting the right people.

Also, why can't startups just raise money to buy an existing site with inbound links? A domain is just a pointer, and handled properly, there is little downside.

A hotel review from October 2003 isn't relevant information

But reviews from 2003 to 2011 might help you spot trends. If the same issue has been reported over the years, it's fairly certain that it's something the hotel has no plans on fixing.

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