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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

> the reality is that Google is a saturated distribution channel that is horrible at identifying quality content that is not heavily branded or pushed in mainstream media.

I'm really not sure I agree. My sister in law is a french tutor in a small English town. She wanted a Web site and I suggested that she put something together using Weebly. I did some basics with her to ensure that reasonable keywords appeared in the page names, headlines and text etc.

A couple of weeks later and if you search on "French tuition in town-x" or "French lessons in county-name" she comes up as hit 3 in Google - I think that's pretty good service from Google.

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In my opinion this really is the easiest way for quality content to rank and I highly recommend it. However, and not to downplay how nice this must be for your sister, but these are relatively obscure terms that don't get many hits. If you are trying to rank on some of the hottest money making keywords on the web, the type with a 6 to 7 figure payday, then you are on a totally different level of difficulty. Orders of magnitude different. Old domains with old content are heavily weighted. New guys have little to no chance. Only extreme viral content can achieve that and hope to be white hat. It looks effortless in the wild but in practice you have a lot of work to do to link-bait and that's still hit and miss. That's why a lot of "SEOs" turn to black hat, and churn and chew up the search engines to scrape whatever they can.

If I'm looking for a French tutor in x-town England I want to find his sister. It's a win-win.

Are any of the people you are pushing offering a win-win in these 6-7 figure payday, or are they just yet another asbestos law firm, that wants the same 1/3 as everyone else, and will fill out the settlement forms just the same as everyone else?

It's an interesting question, and I'm really just an arm-chair SEO when it comes to the world of extreme money keywords. What I do know from experience is that there are a lot of these extremely profitable keywords. With a little research you can figure out what the top 10-100 keywords are, by traffic, in the world or just in the USA.

Some are totally 100% owned by big corporations who get the majority of the hits for that term and expanded phrases. Some might say that's legitimate because that big corp is the best result for that word. But there are plenty of other keywords that are owned by (formerly) regular webmasters who are now on top and fighting to keep it that way, with a sizable incentive to do so. These keywords are highly competitive and those webmasters will do anything it takes to keep the payday rolling in.

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