Hacker News Reader

Comment by sk5t | Hacker News Reader

I would downvote this comment for extreme, petulant vagueness if I had the karma to do so.

Agreed.

If we are going to "pump" up the SEO factor, things like https://www.yourmechanic.com/book/#/addj=10021 for "Car is not starting" would not be in place.

Instead, maybe something like https://www.yourmechanic.com/fix/10021/car-is-not-starting

So yeah, I wouldn't necessarily hold this site up as heavily SEO optimized. Nothing against the company as they are a young company just not a good example IMO.

I don't think pumping is necessary. Their site is not a solution to the general case of "car is not starting", thus should not have a page for that. That would be gaming google, which is fine, but a bad first move for a startup.

I'll now call out YC companies to prove my point. I went to the techcrunch demo day round 1, and have a look at http://vastrm.com/ It is a complete SEO disaster. No reasonable advisor would have said that was a good idea for an e-commerce company.

we are getting there :). more like yourmechanic.com/problem/car-is-not-starting - some place where you can all the common reasons etc. There are a lot of things we need to improve.

I agree that I should be down-voted to the extreme. I chose the vagueness because calling out individual YC companies is now considered bad form. I was trying to be polite.

Compare their SEO strategy to a YC company that repairs iPhones, or the one that sells cars. If you don't know the urls, send me an email and I'll tell you the ones I am talking about.

The YC anti-SEO pattern exists, it is just not polite to call out SEO mistakes, because if anyone builds anything, then we must be supportive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com