The name of the game, if you're trying to serve humans, is to get to the top ~5 entries on Google.
Did you discover that from Google? Did you refuse to look at that link because it wasn't presented as a top 5 hit on Google? Are you not human?
My point is that information can be propagated outside of search engines very easily. Every link on Hacker News is presented to you outside of a search engine.
Optimize for humans. Tell humans that you made something. If Google doesn't want to service their users, that's not a problem you should work on fixing.
These are companies looking to make money to pay staff. Not die on a hill of what they wish reality was, rather than what reality actually is.
No one is telling any individual company to do a specific thing in a vacuum. The suggestion is we re-shape the incentives we have created as an industry and society. It's about values, and we should bucket the discussion because the current batch of MBAs in charge at these companies, who will likely all be gone in 18 months no matter what, are focused on the immediate? Come on. That's not how anyone should determine what their values are.
There's no sign of that suggestion in this thread. The GP was talking about today, and has never mentioned huge sweeping policy changes from multiple governments around the world to make Google's business model obsolete.
Because so far it’s not very promising, and “just let the company die” is not a strategy people are going to implement.
"Okay, how?"
"You'll figure it out. Bye!"
Information can and does get propagated outside of search engines very easily. That’s the premise of huge industries like email marketing, social media, banner ads, and PR. Are these marketing channels universally beloved by humans? Not exactly.
I think the disconnect here is that you are assuming everything should scale infinitely. Ie: if one company posts, every company should post. If one company sends out spam emails, every company should send out spam emails. If one company tries to make their website #1 on Google for a given search, every company should do the same.
My whole point about talking to your target audience was meant to directly contradict this. Your target audience can only be a finite set of people, because you can only talk to a finite set of people. Otherwise, you're just producing noise and hoping someone will listen to it.
I don't know if CNET is making the right call here. But I can at least understand the logic and thought process they went through, however misguided it appears.
The irony to this whole thread is that CNET is actually highly targeted about their audience development, which is how they decided which content to prune in the first place.
Citation needed. I can tell you about lots of companies that have existed for years. That I never found from Google.
> Different goals, different reactions.
I don't know what you mean by "reactions" here, but I don't think that their goals are good if they end up making what they produce worse in the eyes of their target audience in order to meet that goal.
> CNET is actually highly targeted about their audience development
Some people are saying their audience is tens of millions of people, and others are saying their audience is "highly targeted". Which is it? Those two are claims are extremely incompatible.
2. Identify what that audience wants (by asking them)
3. Build what the target audience asked for if you agree that it is a sensible thing to create.
4. Tell the target audience that you have built your thing.
Note that "target audience" here is probably not Google, but on all 4 points, SEO replaces "target audience" with "Google". Pruning old information is not something that any group of humans have requested besides Google.
When I say "target audience" and "humans" I mean it in the most literal sense. The most effective way to tell people that you built something for them is to tell them.
That's why radio, TV, newspaper advertising was so effective for so long.
Even for a small convenience store, larger scale - mass audience, automated - advertising is almost always a necessity and a far more effective use of time.
Note that only a tiny fraction of your audience is already subscribed to some form of push notification from your service.
None. I don't know tens of millions of people.
Why do you think that CNET - a relatively small group of people - should have the power to reach an influence tens of millions of people, even if only in a small way per person? I don't think that's healthy for anyone involved.
I happen to disagree, but it's obvious that we're working from such completely different axioms that there's no point in arguing this further.
Which in mondern parlance is what is being accomplished by newsletters, mailing lists, and various social media feeds.
But if you're in the business, as in commercial enterprise, of reaching out to a large and generally undefined audience, or are responsible for government or NGO services, etc., general Web search is among your most valuable marketing mechanisms. And that sector includes literally billions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions or equivalent value.
And manual outreach through a small group ... really isn't effective.
I'm not saying that your specific use case is invalid. I am saying, as someone with a deep and abiding animosity to virtually all modern marketing, advertising, and SEO, that modern marketing, advertising, and SEO do in fact have a place. And that your comments here are largely asserting otherwise.
I don't think people should skip step 1 in the name of making a buck. Having a target audience should be critical for a commercial endeavor.
> And manual outreach through a small group ... really isn't effective.
Why do you think that?
Your second question simply doesn't deserve a response.
Clearly it did, and quite a disrespectful one at that. I guess (and I have to guess, since you won't tell me) you think that because you can't talk to many people, and you think it is self evident that businesses should target many people.
I do not think that is self evident. I think instead of few people targeting many people, many people should target few people. You have probably heard that you can't make everyone happy. That's true. But it becomes less true the smaller the group that "everyone" is. If your target audience is a handful of people, you can make them all happy. You can even potentially individualize what you produce to meet the needs of specific individuals. You cannot do that when your target audience is a billion people.
Be nicer next time.