Almost Everything is Unprofitable (SEO and Startups) | Hacker News Reader

Almost Everything is Unprofitable (SEO and Startups)

seobook.com

10 pointsterrellm9 comments

I have absolutely no idea what this article is trying to tell me. I think it's (luckily) quite unusual to encounter writing that's so completely and utterly unintelligible.

that's par for the course with SEOBook. Aaron is brilliant, but his commentaries are never direct. For example, read some of the stuff he's written about eHow-- it's hard to tell if he loves them or hates Google, and ultimately where he comes down on the issue.

It reminds me of the type of text that's produced by a spam-bot. Content for the sake of content .. food for search engines.

The filler text complaint is a common complaint against SEOs, but that is a problem far more common with the likes of content mills. That post includes many things that were not publicly known in the prior context (like TripAdvisor's past link buying).

Content which parochially states "x is never worth doing" is of far lower quality stuff than content which is rich in historical context with actual examples used based on real-world data and experience.

The example of TripAdvisor being impossible to beat (along with suggesting that start ups need to avoid risk) is a quite laughable combination since TripAdvisor was buying so many links that Matt Cutts directly contacted them in person at a conference and warned them about it. They levered up on risk until they felt it was about to catch up with them & then backed off.

That sort of approach is far smarter than saying "take no risk." After all, most start ups end up failing anyhow. Success is not about avoiding risks, but taking smart ones.

I do leave wiggle room in the words because I often analyze how systems are changing. Such analysis is based on hunches and presumption and experiences that can't always fully be revealed publicly without leading people astray or adding unnecessary risk.

If I am too ridged in how I write & then Google changes their approach in a slightly different way, then I look like the bad guy for not being 100% right 100% of the time.

Predicting the future is hard.

And since some people read your writing months or years after you type something, being too rigid in a changing ecosystem is going to lead some folks astray. This is only compounded by the verticalization of search, SEO strategies being different in different regions of the world, SEO strategies having different levels of risks vs reward for different types of organizations, etc.

Also in some cases Google has been known to have a vindictive side, which throws other presumptions out the window. You learn a new part of "the algorithm" when you are put up to vote for public lynching on a Google engineer's blog. :D

That said, they typically are pretty fair. Though there are some absurd exceptions. ;)

I am more for promoting questioning authority & encouraging testing than a static paint-by-number approach. That can make it seem like the writer is being obtuse or translucent, but that is far better than saying "always do X" and then have someone get utterly destroyed for following the tip.

Also we do run a number of sites. And our approach is based on "do what works." I may criticize Google's approach to something while testing how well it works. I don't control their ecoysystem, but I do monitor how it works and run many tests in parallel.

For the record with eHow, I don't mind them existing and am totally cool with Google being fine with them. What I do think is laughable though is the following combination:

- Google claiming they can't judge content quality when they frequently judge the intent of links (with far less information available)

- Google writing an algorithm to catch content farms which torches 10's of thousands of smaller websites while somehow missing eHow

- Google torching some people for using expired domains, but not giving a crap if eHow buys a registrar and does it in bulk (which is yet another side of "the algorithm" most people do not understand)

Ultimately I am fine with search engines doing whatever they feel they should. All I ask is for consistency in enforcement & approach. If they assume you are guilty & should be destroyed for doing x, then they shouldn't preach their moral superiority when they fund someone doing 100x or 1000x worse than what was worth torching you over.

I haven't had any sites fully torched in quite a long time, but I can tell you that the site that was penalized to the most extreme level was not doing anywhere near the same level of shady crap that eHow was doing recently. It was not even in the same league or solar system! But I know if I followed eHow's lead on some of that stuff I would get torched.

I thought that post was rather direct. The points of it were...

- anytime you enter a new market you are typically doing so from a competitive disadvantage

- to come from behind you need a unique strategy (rather than relying on a paint-by-number approach to business)

- it is at best close-minded to call any channel or model unequivocally dead across the board, especially if you do not know much about it

- the people that Chris was describing as impossible to beat established stars of today were indeed gray area players a few years back. If they would have "stuck to the rules" back then & used a similar analysis of the market back then as Chris offers today, then they never would have created their websites...which are now market leaders.

From the optimized (?) seobook.com front page: "And now you can hire Aaron as your personal SEO coach for just around $10 per day!"

Oh my.

cute... $300/mo per month subscription = $10/day. bleh... a subscription is hardly the same as personal coaching.

Our membership site has only been open for a couple years (with a 3 month pause in there) and I personally wrote about 25,000 posts in the forums, answering thousands and thousands of questions. It honestly doesn't get much more personal than that IMHO.

If you haven't experienced it then sure it can seem like marketing for the sake of marketing, but the fact that I was willing to shut down the site (make it bring in $0 revenue for 3 months while it was costing 5 figures a month) shows that I am not trying to maximize revenues without care toward quality...and that I am willing to invest in having a quality service.

And Patio11 has frequently highlighted on Hacker News that the best advice he got from us wasn't even directly SEO advice, but tips to help change his sales copy. That indeed came from doing a direct and personal review of his site.

If we didn't deliver on what we promise do you think I would have risked closing the site to customers for 3 months?

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