If You’re "Blogging" For SEO, You’re Doing it Wrong | Hacker News Reader

If You’re "Blogging" For SEO, You’re Doing it Wrong

airpair.com

65 pointsaerosmile24 comments

What about posting your own articles for SEO? Is that doing it right?

Hint to budding SEO people, posting on HN doesn't bring much SEO since links expire and it's not very permissive to crawlers.

Only partially true considering posting to HN can lead to many people reblogging or retweeting.

It does work. This submission is literally an example of it working, and we will see 2 or 3 more today and again and again every day. It's not the single link on HN that matters, it's the dozens of automated tweets, posts and whatnot followed by manual links from people if the post is lucky.

I've started flagging SEO campaigns because it's getting a bit stupid that every jackass can write some dumb crap about "omg startup" and then have their coworkers or co-yc-alumni prop it up.

Google will eventually address pandering/gaming social networks - it's not very hard to detect when a company writes and hosts completely unrelated content for somebody else's audience like when a video chat service writes about blogging for SEO. 10 years ago it was "free articles" (http://www.articlesbase.com/) you could host full of juicy content + a couple spammy backlinks for the original author, 5 years ago it was stupid infographics, now it's "social media articles".

It's just a loophole that unfortunately hinges on exploiting us.

SEO is one of the verticals we support, and is one of the most popular ones.

Depending on where you post, your links may or may not end up passing any link equity, but generally speaking it's a good idea to get a conversation going about your brand (as long as some of the edge cases don't apply, such as negative comments, guest blogging on low-quality domains, etc).

While I certainly agree that have blog.domain.com may not be the best move in terms of SEO, I do think it's important to prioritize users clarify/navigation above SEO benefits.

Next, I'm curious if you have a sitemap file? I see your using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, which means typically it lives in /sitemap_index.xml. Clearly you have a custom url setup w/ your app, but I'm questioning whether this is setup? From my past experience, this is the first thing you should do.

Finally, your top navigation links apparently go to specific categories of posts, and I can't help but point out that your title tags could probably be improved (i.e. - http://www.airpair.com/backbone.js). Fortunately since your using the Yoast plugin (good choice btw), you can change this under Titles & Metas -> Post Types.

Absolutely, we just migrated 200 articles and are in the process of cleaning up the site. The title tags on archive pages and some other ones are not finished yet, but all top landing pages are all green in Yoast. Sitemap (text and video) is in place. Good observations, thanks for the feedback!

If you’re "writing" about SEO, you’re doing it wrong:

It has been explained repeatedly but I'll repeat it again. Optimizing for search engines is to a great extent wasted energy.

Create just interesting content -> People will refer to it automagically -> Ranking on search engines will automagically improve -> More people will come to your site and more people will recommend it.

Optimizing things for search engines -> People don't find what they are hoping for -> You have to "optimize" more and more. This is a vicious circle.

I hope that smart people use their ability to create beautiful things and not waste it by performing tricks.

Where in the flow above would you put items like: "Make sure that Google Authorship is set up?" Surely, you can't argue that this wouldn't help your content if implemented correctly. There is a long list of similar technical SEO items that smart publishers cover with every new article.

Your sentiment is just a reflection of the damage that SEO snake oil salesmen have created in our industry. These days, everyone claims to be a knowledgable SEO, and there are no straight forward ways to prove that (unlike, say, when you say "I know a lot about natural language processing"). Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater - good SEOs are still generating a ton of value at the top companies in the world.

Under-delivering article that discusses SEO 101.

It's a very niche topic that I haven't found covered anywhere else (how to proxy request between Wordpress and Node.js, and serve both apps on a single root domain).

The lead up was basic, but I wanted to make sure that everyone was able to follow as I transitioned into the more advanced topics.

Clearly, I could have spent less time on the basics, good feedback!

Great writ up. I've actually been meaning to do this for a while, but hadn't gotten around to it. I'll probably write a guide in the next few days and have a VA create variations for it on related fields.

Thanks for the reminder and the push, hopefully I'll see some results from these efforts in the next 6-12 months.

Thanks, would love to see your guide! You should see some results much sooner than 6-12 months (assuming you're cranking out good content).

Really about.com ROTFL - pull the other one mate its got bells on.

Good white hats knew that mega spun/thin content sites where on the way out years ago - even before Matt Cutts blog post a few days ago.

Your own unique original content still has a lot of value say if infinti red bull racing did behind the scene blogs about f1.

All I can tell you is that there are a ton of people at About working day and night on making the content as good as it can be. They are some of the hardest working people I've ever worked with.

The title suggests the author is going to explain some very sophisticated ways to get traffic/leads from blogging, yet goes on to talk about fairly straightforward things everybody should know: ie having blog in own subdomain.

It says the opposite in the article, that you shouldn't have blog.domain.com, but rather it should be hosted on the main domain.

Yeah it started out very in depth but then mentioned one very obvious fundamental SEO practice (something Matt Cutts bestowed upon us many months/years ago) and then goes off into bizarro land with the CMS stuff at the end.

Jose, I appreciate that feedback. I tried to address readers of all levels of SEO experience, so I started out with the basics and then progressively went deeper into some more advanced topics. It sounds like I could have been more clear i my writing. If you have any specific questions about the CMS stuff, just let me know.

Sorry for the harsh criticism (this is HN after all) I just was confused and it's probably my fault based on assumptions I had going in. I tend to eat up SEO articles because I have small business web clients for whom I perform SEO service but this was more targeted for larger online brands running blogging or content creation networks.

As someone else pointed out, that's exactly the opposite of what I suggested. Here's more info why putting your blog on a subdomain is not a good idea: http://www.agent-seo.com/blogging/seo-subdomain-vs-subdirect...

Interesting article. Do you have any thoughts about what we could do on our site, babywatch.co?

Love your product! The site is still a bit basic, with only 6 indexed urls and a domain authority of 18. Further, your web mentions seem to be split between babywatch.co and babywatchome.com, and you're not 301 redirecting from one domain to another. I would pick a domain name (ideally something you can see yourself sticking with in the long-term), and then consolidate all the inbound link equity under that one roof. The next step would be then to start producing content, perhaps even with the server infrastructure I suggested in my article :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com