Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

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The dark side of SEO is a multi-billion dollar industry that no investigative journalist has ever bothered to decipher, even though it can be done in less than a year. I wish I had the capital to do it because for the last 10 years, most of what you have clicked on in Google hasn’t been earned but heavily manipulated by people who aren’t afraid to pay $400 to $5,000 dollars per backlink.

Now we’re in the endgame though. Google is already rolling out features like showing follower counts in searches as a precaution against spammy sites. Who wants to click on an article for a site with 500 followers when you can click on Forbes which has millions.

Need plumbing advice? Forbes got you. Need an airplane technician who lives 58 degrees North of 6th street in Austin, TX? Yep, Forbes got experts lined up for that too.

Someone said it best in another thread, those who still give a shit about the web will go back to IRC and forums and that will be the end of it.

You couldn’t trust Google before, now you most definitely can’t. And to think that they are rolling out all their generative features soon to compensate for OpenAI wiping the floor with them…

At that point why do we even need Google? Any search will lead you to the same circle of mega-sites. If only sites that are already popular get exposure that's not a search engine, that's a directory. May as well go back to "Jerry & David's Guide to the World Wide Web"

The value isn't us, that care about the web and quality search results, it's the vast majority of normals that just type stuff into Google and click away. They'll continue doing that, and not even notice, when it does turn into "Jerry & David's Guide to the World Wide Web".

There have been numerous investigations into SEO over the years. Good luck finding them, though. I'd link them if I could remember any details or find them on search engines.

If SEO was so easily gamed, GOOGLE competitors would’ve sidelined it by offering more relevant results.

This is clearly not the case. Google heavily prioritizes users actually finding what they are looking for.

But of course the results are relevant… You wouldn’t write a novel based on the chance that someone would search for that specific type of plot.

Google works the same way. It gives you results based on what you search for, but who gets to sit at the top and how did that site get to the top? Because it followed Google’s guidelines which can be offset by a single editorial backlink?

That’s the angle I am talking about. There are millions of niches where big money can be made, and in those specific niches you don’t rise to the top simply because you are the best. Google has no idea what is or isn’t the best and for them it’s just as much of a guessing game.

I suppose I am talking specifically about selling links. How would you feel if you found out that one of the journalists whose content you admire is also participating in these schemes? And mind you, editorial links are like the top of the food chain.

Underneath that you got millions of other sites that will sell links starting anywhere from $10 to $1,000 bucks depending on their own “authority”.

That’s what I would like to see investigated and exposed, because it can be done. As someone who operates a mildly successful blog, I get around 300 emails a month asking me to peddle all kinds of products and whatnot.

No. The competitors scrapers are banned. Only the big ones are let through.

I can apply the same argument as you. "If the almighty invisible hand was allowed to compete in the search space competitors would pop up with their own indexers".

> Who wants to click on an article for a site with 500 followers when you can click on Forbes which has millions.

The problem is while Forbes can have high quality articles, it also has a wide array of VERY low quality ones.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/an-incomplete-history-of-f...

So the issue becomes it's less the domain I trust/don't trust, but rather a more complicate heuristic.

Yep. That’s the point I was making. Forbes will shovel rocks for sale if the margin is in the $5 dollar range. All these authority sites are doing it.

Ahh, sorry. I need more coffee!

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