Many (most?) tech companies fill their sites with low-quality, jargon-filled pages that don't actually answer questions - either becuase they're written by marketers with a poor grasp of the technology, or because they don't want to 'give away' their expertise.
If you actually answer the question in a reasonably full way, there is nothing to stop you ranking highly. Google values valuable content.
As a concrete example, I found a grey area way to get a somewhat popular hardware tinkerer interested in something I did. Maybe I even skirted the rules a bit by sending him a free sample of my cool toy and some rough code samples. He took it well beyond what I could. I didn't ask for anything. The investment paid off. Aside from his initial blog post, others took inspiration and posted their own variations.
Google now thinks I'm the bomb for something very niche, but reasonably profitable. Likely because my efforts, plus other's work, netted some interesting backlinks. and backlinks to their posts. And maybe I am a badass in this very narrow niche, but I doubt Google would know if I hadn't pushed the envelope a little.
Is that so? I thought conventional wisdom is that they now have much stronger signals about how well results satisfy queries, from Google Analytics and Chrome.
Provide genuine value to people making web searches. Google will keep updating their algorithms to make searches result in better results for people.
“Tricks” can sometimes make you rank quickly, but building genuinely valuable content is the best long term strategy. (And I acknowledge that not everybody is looking for long term value from sites they build, which means they shouldn’t follow that advice. If you are trying to rank a site for a one off event, for example, where you really don’t care about search traffic in 12/18/60 months time, your site will end up looking a lot closer to SEO-spam de jour.)
I then sent several folks a free sample of a thing, and also rough code, that costs me $100 or so.
And the gamble paid off. One of them ran off with it. It benefitted them pretty much zero as far as I know.
I totally gamed the system. It was not natural in any sense. I got ~3000 sales, and maybe $10k of upside, which was disproportionately in my favor. Most of the magic was this person's fruitful efforts to take my rough idea into something popular. But I like to selfishly think nobody really "lost" in this little microcosm.
Google has posted a warning on their Webmaster Blog about providing free review samples, they will take action against companies that do it:
"Bloggers should use the nofollow tag on all such links because these links didn’t come about organically (i.e., the links wouldn’t exist if the company hadn’t offered to provide a free good or service in exchange for a link)."
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/03/best-practices-for...
"Maybe I even skirted the rules a bit by sending him a free sample of my cool toy and some rough code samples. He took it well beyond what I could. I didn't ask for anything."
Certainly seems easy enough to argue complies with:
"send bloggers free products to review or give away in return for a mention in a blogpost"
If you don't ask for mentions in blogs, that Webmaster Blog post doesn't technically apply, right? There's gray area in choosing to send free samples to people you are pretty sure will mention/link to you in a blog post, but where you don't ask them to (or place any expectation on them to). So "skirting the rules a bit" sounds about right to me. There weren't "review units", they were "free gifts". No request or expectation of a "review".
That said, as far as ethics & free gifts, this is why politicians, journalists and businesses usually have rules about accepting free gifts, often requiring them to return the gifts or give them to charity instead.
Here's a post on Journalism Ethics relating to accepting free gifts:
https://ethics.journalists.org/topics/gifts-free-travel-and-...
They got attention as well. They may well be the center of the attention for your product now, with people with questions asking them or their community first.
The trade you entered is quite common with reviewers nowadays.
That "buying links" is the only deadly sin next to cloaking is more strong evidence for Google primarily relying on it. You don't get penalized for abusing Microdata, stuffing Emjois into your Title + Description or writing barely readable keyword-stuffed SEO texts, but get links from a well-known link-selling-site and watch your -100 penalty wreck your traffic.
Do you have any official source for this? I remember they clearly saying that Google Analytics data is not used and will not be used for search in any way.
Perhaps it is more of a grey area. Probably not so much the whole Show HN thing, more of the hustle seen in the comments.
Usually you see someone comment on a post about some tech by saying "I am with X company and we are working on Y to solve this problem!".
Personally, I think this stuff is great. You gotta respect the hustle.
The productive thing to do for that site to write Elixir tutorials or at the very least, write about things Elixir devs are looking for—instead of content marketing strategies—and to put it on the same site! Here's an example of piece I wrote which did move the needle a bit on the business side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20721433
So why am I writing "meta" stuff on a totally new blog and submitting it here instead of putting all my time into the business site? Here's my best understanding of my motivations:
1) Internet points are fun! Not something I feel should be a major motivator, but it is what it is.
2) Increase my luck surface area. Who knows what opportunity could emerge or who I can meet, just because I do things and write about them?
3) Provoke discussion and maybe learn more about the topics I'm writing about and thinking about from all of you! Lammy and TeMPOraL have each already given me an idea in this thread.
4) Generate some level of goodwill from people who have found my writing useful or interesting. It's difficult to quantify the effect, but I believe that it will translate into more help, retweets, etc for my projects in the long run.
Then create content that addresses these pain points very specifically.
SEOs tend to get blinded by search metrics and keyword data. There are countless long tail queries that might show negligible results in your keyword tool, but are very pertinent to your target market.
You won't get much traffic from such "pain point SEO", but whatever queries do come your way will be highly targeted.
In general, unless you rely on ad revenue, you should never use traffic as a success metric for SEO. It tends to blind your decision making. I've ranked for a single keyword that got me 80k visitors a month, but I've made more money from keywords that got me 10 visitors a month.
(I could probably write some of those stuff on my personal blog, but SO has an added advantage of soliciting comments and alternative answers; people on blogs are less keen to do that IMO).
Fun fact: when I was interviewing for my last job, I got stuck on an unexpected issue when coding. I could use google, and found my gist from few years before with similar problem which got me unstuck (I totally forgot about having it written) as #1 item in Google.
IME, SO and gist index really well in Google and often end in top of results. HN, less do (unless you explicitly put hackernews or site:... in query).
Almost all people are producing content for a company, product etc in which they are not the target customer and hence are not doing searches for.
It would have been useful had they explained how to methodically discover long tail keywords that aren't being satisfied with good content for any subject.
The problem with this approach is that it only works if you want to create content for the things you searched for. Just because I'm googling obscure shit doesn't mean I want to write an article with ads about it. I could see this technique work for someone who wants to start a technical blog -- make your posts the first result on a bunch of obscure issues you run into.
I'd say the question is, "Do your in-depth searches cluster around a general topic?"
My much larger site 10-15 years ago was primarily about language learning. It had some fairly niche topics I was concerned that virtually no English-language speakers would be looking for, and yet the traffic rolled in. It was a blog, though. Also, some of those topics became more popular over time. Extensive Reading and Spaced Repetition were two examples.
My current site is in my profile and it's pretty tightly focused around Elixir (roughly the 50th most popular programming language).
This is one reason why you'll see a page with one topic as a title often branch off to cover many related but sort of unexpected topics throughout the page - it's to cover the main keyword but also grab coverage on the related ones that might be easier to rank for (by simply mentioning it in a page vs. dedicating a page to it). As the owner of that site, you might see that one of these pages could be getting traffic from hundreds of keywords, and 10 of them are on a distinct enough topic that warrants another page. So you build a page for that, etc.
I answered a fairly simple question on Stackoverflow many years ago that has a bunch of upvotes, and still generates a few dozen a week.
I didn’t do anything magical, just wrote a response in a way that resonates with people. I have not repeated that feat either, so I possess no unusual skill. If you write every day, you’ll do the same thing eventually with something.
Sometimes I think I should have made a blog and added some pics. Then those upvotes might have been ad revenue.
It's just a pet project, but it's consistently in the top 5 of any given relevant search phrase.