Keep up the good work Google. I hope this serves as encouragement for them to continue to screw over those who want to turn searching for relevant information into a war for who can cheat the system the best.
"Before, SEO was the game of really skilled people, you know like professional poker players. You had to know the game, know when to raise, and when to bluff."
Then with the "Maybe I should find another job?" I thought this has got to be satire. Well played, sir.
The way the piece is framed, the writing style, surely a work of humour?
-Rewarding relevant, informative, keyword-rich content focused on specific topics and punishing sites that construct thinly constructed (UGC or otherwise) pages, particularly those who do it in huge numbers.
-Rewarding sites who links from similarly relevant, authoritative sources gained organically and punishing those who acquire links through artificial means (either through direct purchases, purchasing domain portfolios with thousands of backlinks etc.)
There are nuances that are market-specific that require slightly different approaches and concentrations (e.g. health care) but those are the main things folks should concern themselves with. There's no black magic behind it unless you're doing something shady to begin with.
I can show you dozens of examples of well-funded "A list" too-cool-for-SEO developers who have no idea whatsoever what "built correctly" entails from the POV of a search engine.
The role of SEO is a) Product Management to set requirements to optimize crawlability, indexing, and retrieval, or b) QA that arrives after the fact and highlights all the ways the site fails to be usable for bots.
My experience is if you design things right first, it costs much less than if you don't. Plus you see the upside of your efforts quickly.
But maybe some people take the attitude that "giving me traffic is Google's job" and then when they don't get organic traffic, they have to buy it. Hopefully they also enjoy raising money and giving up a big chunk of their company, too.
That's what I said.
SEO will always be a "thing" as long as people are not always interested in providing relevant information. It will always be an asymmetric battle between people who want to prioritize their noise over useful signal.
SEO is [also] about bridging the gap between machine-based abstraction of the data in your site and human searchers. Most of the on-page/on-site optimisations are simply ensuring that the SE can abstract the right information so that users searching for the content you're providing can find it.
SEO will always be a thing as long as Googlebot fails to perfectly abstract the data content of a site and perfectly rank sites according to user needs.
But the tone of this "article" makes this guy sound like he wears a black hat.
I'm glad Google is cleaning house b/c it became annoying trying to counsel people to not violate the Webmaster Guidelines when they could point to successful competitors or some backwater infomercial claiming they could shortcut their way by spamming.
The best strategy I've found is just to not shoot yourself in the foot in terms of site structure and IA, and invest in long-term value through link building with PR and content that naturally attracts links.
You have no idea...
Just the existence of spam doesnt prove it's a big oppotunity, just that it's better for some people than their opportunity cost.
Ever looked at the payday SERP in the UK? Google can't control it. I know at least 3-4 people who make £100,000 a year with just basic level spamming.
If I scaled this technique http://explicitly.me/serp-sniffing-a-long-tail-keyword-strat... , I could make the same amount of money without breaking a sweat by dumping Adsense on there, and shopping affiliate links.
The point is I don't choose to.
Then we produce articles (we actually hire real journalists) to address the search intent behind the keywords. Then we post it on the client's site, and charge them for the leads we drive via organic search from that content.
The funny thing is, our customers just view it as "content marketing," not SEO. Search data (search vol, competition, etc.) guides our content strategy, but I don't view this part as either good or bad. Or even really "SEO". Why would anyone invest in content nobody is searching for?!?
If we spun content or used Markov chains to generate gibberish or hired incompetent writers via TextBroker for $10 a story, sure that's spam.
But my calculation is that spending $500+ on an article written by a journalist with domain expertise is going to win long term. And since the lead revenue makes the ROI calculation >1, why not invest in quality?
And we definitely don't make Google guess what keyword we think our article would help.
And the black hatters who make money could probably make just as much if they did something legit.
The worst part about black hat is eventually the wheels fall off and you have to start over. So you're playing a game that keeps you on a constant treadmill. It's just as bad as consulting as a way to make a living.
If you take the high road, you build real value you can exit on eventually.
I'm happy that so many HN readers are anti-SEO, because that's less competition for me.
This is not to say that I actively work against what's best for society. My point is that I will do what's best for my business, with regard to nothing else. I think that is what makes a good business owner. Another trait of a good business owner is the belief that his business provides the best value in its market. If you truly believe that, then by engaging in SEO to rank your business at the top of its market, you ARE doing what's best for society. If you suggest that engaging in SEO tactics to rank your business at the top is BAD for society, then you are inherently suggesting that your business does not provide the best value to its market.
First, claim the reasonable principle that law should guard morality, and business should attend only to business. It's in principle correct, so it gets accepted by everyone. So, if child labor were allowed, business owners would be in no moral fault for hiring kids to mine ore -- to pick a extreme example.
Second, claim that economic progress is good for everyone. Again, very reasonable. Then, organize as a political class (say, in nowadays Republican party) to get some legal concessions that were morally abhorrent in the past legal framework, in more or less degree, but would bring economic progress (for some definition of it). Say, legalize child labor. Voilá.
Now, it's obvious that capitalists should be, of course, allowed to organize politically. But, I argue that we live in a world disproportionately controlled by capital (specially the US), for various reasons. It's disingenuous, thus, to be a capitalist and have your mindset. You, as member of a class, have certain privileges that other classes in our society would consider unfair. Our current legal framework is loaded in your favor, after all.
Much of the world inhabited by HN'ers is not like this. If you have a typical software or web product, then a competitor would have to spend substantial resources developing code that duplicates your functionality, and then they have to worry about the head-start the first mover has in branding and network effects.
>Your job as a business owner is to bring as many customers to your business as you can. To suggest anything else is absurd.
Technically your job is to generate as much profit as possible. Volume of people in the door is but a single coefficient in that equation. It's a common failure point, yes, but suggesting that it is the only one is disingenuous.