Google Lies: The Myth of Good Content | Hacker News Reader

Google Lies: The Myth of Good Content

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I think there's a misunderstanding. When Google says "good content," what they mean is "content that is useful to people," not "content with a high level of artistic or technical quality." Useful in this context might mean "entertaining," "intriguing," "instructive," or "answers my question" depending on the type of content.

Content that is useful gets visited, linked, revisited, and relinked to more people; that content climbs the ranks of Google.

Only if it is initially promoted.

Generally that's true, but the more useful your content is, the less promotion it'll (probably) need.

I do not believe this to be the case, hence the post.

Here's a test for you: open up a new blog account. Make a post that says "I will give you 20 bucks if you email me"

Make sure the blog does not ping all of the search providers. Or go ahead and ping them. It might be interesting to try each way.

And then just do -- nothing.

Obviously the page has immediate value and usefullness to anybody that could use twenty bucks. But how many takers or readers do you think you'd get?

Well, my comment was meant to distinguish between your examples of quality and other metrics of utility. You gave the example of popular singers, and popular singers might not be the "best singers" in the sense of musical quality, but they entertain a lot of people a great deal. The unnammed woman who stirred up an online community got a lot of traffic, and she might not be well-liked, but clearly she provoked a lot of discussion and interest (if only rubbernecking entertainment sort of interest) among people linking to her and reading articles about her, so there's an element of usefulness in what she did.

You say that Google's idea is "...that if a lot of people cite you, you must be on to something." I'd refine this to say that if a lot of people cite you, you must be providing some kind of thing that those people value.

My thoughts on your $20 scenario --

- I think part of the problem here is that an offer like that on the internet isn't very credible. If I were reading that page, I would be unlikely to actually get 20 dollars, because I probably wouldn't take it seriously enough to email you. As a result, that page isn't really very useful in a certain practical sense.

- If you were able to make it credible somehow, and even one person stumbled across the page, emailed you, and received 20 dollars, I bet that you would get a very large amount of readers very fast. If your page was accessible to search engines, I suspect that you might get that one person (and a later flood of people once word spread) without any promotion at all, eventually.

I think we're engaged in a bit of circular reasoning here.

You're saying that because readers would be skeptical of the $20 offer, it really isn't useful (provide value). And since there are links, there must be value. But by defining "value" as providing links, you're using the metric Google has set up -- so of course those with more links will have more value, because you don't have any other measurement!

The $20 shows that there can be real value in a post or article and yet have no links. So the links=value formula does not hold at the margins. There is always a disconnect between future perceived value of the article after consumption and degree of gossip in the popular world. They're anything but directly related. But they are loosely enough related to work mostly.

I think I see what you're saying. By having to make the $20 offer credible, you're engaging in the sort of "marketing" that you wouldn't need to do if the inherent value somehow shone through on its own, right?

OK, I agree with that. I wonder whether it's ever possible to do any better, though.

Testing: http://benhoyt.com/20bucks.php

That's just 20 bucks to one person, so the expected value of emailing you is less than a dollar.

Results: Okay, it's been about three days now, and it was hardly a conclusive study, but yep, Daniel was right. It didn't market itself, and I only got 8 people emailing me (in the first day, none afterwards). So I get to keep my $20. :-)

Nope. 95% of it is "be worth linking to". You can brute force that thru social pressure and/or effort. But if you are worth talking about and linking to, you should be able to tell 100 people with talk/write online by brute force, and sit back and wait as word spreads.

Practically speaking, everything can't be THAT worth talking about, so promotion is important. But people spend way too little time honing their story and way too much time trying to get it out there.

I don't think Google's lying when it says that content is the "best" way to get people. Sure, a combination of terrific marketing and some gray to black hat SEO techniques will get plenty of visits quickly, but the solid content will be what keeps visitors coming back and referring a site to others. In that respect, good content isn't the "fastest" way to get people, but I'd suggest that it's still the "best".

Take the pop music example a step further. The most popular singers at any given moment will consist of those that are the most hyped and marketed, but that group will also have genuinely talented individuals who have maintained popularity because they are able to live up to the hype.

All that said, I agree that marketing and promotion is just as important as building a great product. That's basically the same thing as being able to communicate why something's great instead of hoping that people will just figure it out for themselves.

I think maybe there needs to be a distinction between initial traffic - where you might need to shout above the din to get noticed - and long tail traffic, which is almost the opposite.

Also, see Filthy Linking Rich: http://www.keyworddriven.com/filthy-linking-rich-and-getting... - a good read and ironically long on content and from 2004.

You're wrong. SEO will get you the visits, but Google monitors time on your site, clicks to related search results, bounces, and returns to the search results page. They use crafty machine-learning.

If you get a bunch of in-links, but your content doesn't perform (or worse performs in a spammy way), you're visits are going to tank. As I understand it, PageRank nowadays basically controls in what order Google will crawl your pages, and has some effect on your SERPs. But the algorithms are far from dependent on PageRank/popularity.

Content matters.

You misunderstood. I am NOT saying that content does not matter. I am NOT saying to game the system just for hits. Geesh. I love writing, and I write the best content I can.

I am saying that marketing is and has always been 90% and content 10%. That's true for blogging, for programming, for anything where you're trying to have an impact on people.

And it's not you, but I'm really tired of all the hand-waving and magic Google talk. I'm sure they have special powers that lets them see at night too, but they don't have the power to change reality. If you measure something and reward people based on it, people will game the system to increase the measure. No matter how complicated your magic system is.

This is a fairly silly gripe. There is no objective measure for "best," content. Google has done a great job of finding relevant results for a given topic, and as the previous poster pointed out, they are constantly making adjustments to prevent "gaming," of the system as you describe it.

Beyond that, marketing is nothing more than swaying people's opinions. If you engage in marketing, and convince people you have the best content, and Google picks up on that and increases the page rank accordingly, I'd say they are doing exactly what they advertise.

Marketing may be important, but content is way more than 10%. How many sites have you ever visited? How many do you return to frequently, and tell others about?

Now, what makes the difference, marketing, or your experience at that site?

This guy has famously boasted that his page was ranked higher than those of companies with billion-dollar advertising budgets, without him ever promoting it. Why? Because it was funny. And that's all it took. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maddox_(writer)

Experts Exchange is a favorite whipping boy here lately (and with great reason). I bring it up because if Google put as much weight on the UX measurements as you claim, SERPs would be bereft of Experts Exchange links. Most of us here know you can see the answers by scrolling to the bottom, but even a lot of professional devs I know hit the back button when they see the "join now" links, let alone the novices and hobbyists.

A few friends of mine in the eCommerce business hit top 3 rankings on semi-competitive keyphrases by doing nothing to their sites but building rich internal link structures.

One of them sold ipod covers, for example. Product descriptions, marketing text, etc, all read "[iPod covers], also called [iPod Jackets] are [covers for the iPod]" etc etc etc. And each of those phrases link back to the Index.

After they did this-- creating thousands of links leading back to the index-- they went from google obscurity to top of the rankings. And they've held that spot for a long time.

And this massive amount of text with every 3rd word a link back to the index is not good content. It's horrible, actually. And there's a LOT of it.

And that's not blackhat. That's 100% legit SEO!

The web is not about good content. It's a popularity game. Popularity games are played by knowing the right people, doing each other favors, getting out and meeting people, and by being, well, popular.

This is supposed to be some grand epiphany about the web? How about the fact that this is how people have chosen what to consume and whom to deal with for the all of modern history?

I agree, but with a few caveats. Promoting your writing means much more than just telling your friends about it. Often it means putting on a show within the blog post itself. If you write your posts in such a way that makes them look like you worked really hard on them then you'll get a lot more hits than if you just write down really brilliant ideas matter-of-factly. Showmanship applies to more than just juggling and professional wrestling, people are much more apt to like your writing if you make it look like you're thinking at the edge of your intellectual abilities. There are a bunch of other interesting things like this too. I think you are generally correct in your understanding though.

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