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Comment by jwie | Hacker News Reader

SEO is kinda dead.

In an honest form it’s “don’t confuse the crawler.”

In its actual form it makes the web worse. Even if you create a strategy that works Google will eventually shut it down.

It’s an adversarial relationship. The search engines want you to buy ads, not win shelf space.

The organizations that can pull off SEO still do it more to suppress competition. It’s not a low cost way to find customers anymore. It’s keeping people from figuring out you can file your taxes for free.

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Legitimate SEO is still alive. Gaming SEO is now a losing proposition. I've told stakeholders for at least the last 5 years that writing genuine and relevant content is 90% of the job. Technical SEO is basically a task to not screw up and offend the crawlers. Web vitals is an interesting new twist but it's a better game than AMP was.

This is my impression / approach, too, and I’m wondering if someone here can bring a solid argument for a better option so I can have my team correct course or reallocate resources.

Ultimately I feel well-written and structured content is a self-solving seo scenario.

I think the game of "let's write a bunch of stuff so we get free views from Google" is also kinda dead. Your content has to be valuable and it takes a significant investment to do that. A good example is Hubspot which has dozens of articles on how to run digital operations for small businesses that are well-written, well-researched and contain some actual insights and even talks about products besides their own. If you don't have the chops to do that kind of thing, you're just better off paying for ad space.

Web vitals have very little impact on SEO though. Some of the top ranked sites have awful scores. Google has never said how much impact it has not I'd bet close to 5%.

We've actually seen web vital bugs tank our rankings pretty quickly. And fixing them resolved the ranking almost as fast.

I should specify that we are a timely news site, so there's some different mechanics at play. We mostly rank for content posted within the last 24-48 hours. Google has a slightly different set of rules for that kind of content vs marketing or evergreen.

Our biggest competitor fails in every Core Vital, and their page takes 13 seconds to load. Ours loads in under 2 seconds. They rank higher in every market. They run national ads and have tons of backlinks. Core Vitals aren't that important when compared to other things. If you're in a less marketable industry, your CLS being .01 better than your competitors isn't going to do anything. I can make my core vitals score absolutely perfect, but it could hurt user experience along the way. It's not a perfect metric by any means. Just something people bring up during sales pitches at this point.

It’s funny but websites actually compete with Google, since Google wants to keep users in the search engine and not clicking on a web search link, Google will summarize the site’s content to the search query such that the user will not clink on the link to leave the Google search engine

If I'm not mistake google doesn't get paid for ads unless you click on them. In other words google doesn't charge Ads customers for impressions, only clicks.

I was discussing regular web links. I think Adsense is still PPC, which is a bad deal considering it may not result in a conversion. I’ve only used it when they send me $100 free credits. It tilted in no sales. I actually sold a book in my website last through MySpace, so I’m probably not an expert on any of this.

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