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Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

The best alternative IMO to medium.com from the reader's point of view is a personal blog. I much prefer them. However, if you want your articles to be found by people looking for them via Google. Probably best is putting them on Github or other non-scammy site with good page rank.

I noticed it is next to impossible to get personal blog articles in own domain onto Google search results unless they are specifically crafted for Google bot and not for a human reader (it seems to like a thousand words of introduction followed by a thousand words of historic context, then a lengthy personal anecdote and then at the very end - possibly on next page actual answer the reader is looking for).

This includes really niche subjects where almost no content exists. Google still favours showing you forums where people ask similar questions (unanswered). And lots of unrelated stuff rather than an actual blog post that has an exact answer+tutorial in under 300 words.

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I personally dealt with indexing issues of numerous e-commerce projects I worked on and solution is almosrt always straightforward: more link mass. My humble personal blog of 5 pages and one single content-worthy article on it was always well indexed regardless of fact that I did nothing special for that.

I guess the best recipe to get your blog indexed is:

* Make sure you have robots.txt with correct host and sitemap.xml

* Link it everywhere: on your Linkedin, Github, Reddit and every profile.

* Make re-posts on social networks, reddit or other related resources.

* It must be fast and never down so reliable hosting with CloudFlare.

* Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.

* Do add it to Google Webmaster so your search overloard can connect your domain to Google account.

So yeah people who hate CloudFlare and Google Analytics with passion are more likely to have issues to getting on google search result page.

>>So yeah people who hate CloudFlare and Google Analytics with passion are more likely to have issues to getting on google search result page.

This sounds like something the FTC and /or anti-trust should be looking into.

Yeah, but this is the world we live in. The more unusual your hosting setup is the more likely you'll get under some sort of filters.

It seems there is space for newer search engine then.

About half of your suggestions would not be effective. Source: am SEO consultant

>Make sure you have robots.txt with correct host and sitemap.xml

Yes, but no idea what is meant by correct host.

>Link it everywhere: on your Linkedin, Github, Reddit and every profile.

Yes, pagerank

>Make re-posts on social networks, reddit or other related resources.

Possibly. Much more helpful if your content is actually shared as opposed to you spamming it out

>It must be fast and never down so reliable hosting with CloudFlare.

Less important than most realize. As long as it’s not dog shit slow it’s probably fine

>Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.

Utter nonsense. The anti trust blowback from this would be spectacular.

>Do add it to Google Webmaster so your search overloard can connect your domain to Google account.

It’s called Google Search Console now, not webmaster tools. Helpful for insights but zero effect on ranking.

I don't gonna argue that all of my suggestions gonna be effective. Any kind of SEO is always something between black box reverse engineering and voodoo magic: you just follow recommendations and pray it works.

> About half of your suggestions would not be effective. Source: am SEO consultant

I'll be honest here: it was mostly years ago, but I spent good chunk of my life doing some white and black hat SEO myself. I'm not very proud of some of it either. If you're actually working in this area then you well aware that figuring out what works and what doesn't take a lot of time and change constantly

What non-experts can do is to at least to follow some recommendations to get into search index. So I just shared some common tricks that I used myself and they cost nothing to implement.

> Yes, but no idea what is meant by correct host.

As correct host I meant the one target website is using. There are countless websites that have www-prefixed version in robots.txt while actually using non-prefixed domain and not having redirections. Also some of us might start blog on github pages and then forgot to specify correct host when moving it to independent domain, etc.

> Much more helpful if your content is actually shared as opposed to you spamming it out

I'm not suggesting anyone to spam something, but Google cant exactly guess who posted your blog post on reddit or why. Having some is better opposed to having zero ingoing links from social media.

> As long as it’s not dog shit slow it’s probably fine

Reliability is very important though. We're on HN and my guess that a lot of people there would love to host their blog on $10 linode / digitalocean test-server that also run VPN and torrent client and can be down for days after some experiment went wrong.

> Utter nonsense.

That just my personal experience. I dont argue that it will help you with rankings, but it's certainly make it less-likely to get under some anti-spam filter.

> Helpful for insights but zero effect on ranking.

Again it's not about rankings. But at least in past their "Indexing Tool" actually worked to make sure your new blog post actually there in search index.

Person above was complaining about his blog not being indexed at all. So if indexing tool is still there it's will help with this problem.

> >Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.

> Utter nonsense. The anti trust blowback from this would be spectacular.

I've seen spend on ads heavily affect organic results. I wonder when anti trust will fix that

The ad is also an ad for the organic result below it.

> Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.

And check whether that's still legal [0] in your country before you do so.

[0] https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-illegal

The trick to getting your blog content to show up in Google is to have other sites link to it. If you don't have any inbound links you're much less likely to rank.

Getting quality inbound links is tricky. First you have to write great content that people might want to link to... but if nobody hears about it that won't help much.

Back at the dawn of blogging there was a really strong culture of bloggers linking to and amplifying great content from each other. That activity mostly moved to places like Twitter - I'd love to see that happen more again.

I keep having a vague idea of a system or service that would be a sort of tinder for mutual links; if you like a blog, and the author of that blog likes yours, then your links would show up in each others footers in an embeddable widget of some kind. Lots of challenges to make it worthwhile, but it just keeps kicking around in the back of my head.

I suspect that link rings like that would get noticed by Google and flagged down eventually.

Not if those links are clicked by real people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

I always assumed Google's business model requires the searcher to use Google Search some number of times per given search so they make their revenue goal from the user.

In that context what you describe is functioning exactly as intended. The searcher is certainly the product.

> The best alternative IMO to medium.com from the reader's point of view is a personal blog.

What are your favorite options for personal blogs? I'm strongly leaning towards self-hosted WP.

Static generators like HUGO hosted on Github Pages or some CDN.

Zero maintenance. Zero cost except for domain name.

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