Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists | Hacker News Reader

Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

powazek.com

28 pointsblasdel16 comments

"SEO consultants are just web designers who are incapable of doing the other 90% of the job"

By the same logic, web designers are just web developers who are incapable of doing the other 90% of the job.

The article's reasoning seems to imply that everyone who releases a good product without advertising will eventually succeed by word of mouth. This doesn't sound to me like an accurate description of our world, though I'd have liked it to work that way.

>> 1. The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.

Not really. The rest also works, or used to work in the past.

>> Occasionally a darkside SEO master may find some loophole in the Google algorithm to exploit, which might actually lead to an increase in traffic. But that ill-gotten traffic gain won’t last long. <<

That's true, but sometimes it last for several years. In some specific cases, it lasts only a few days, but brings so much revenue that it is still worth doing it.

>> Remember this: It’s not your job to create content for Google.

:-) This is laughable. Everyone can create content, no matter how spammy it might look, that's just a freedom of expression. It's Google problem that they index it.

But of course, there are shady practices like automatically spamming blog comments, and that's evil. I think SEO is ok, it made some people very rich by exploiting search engine holes, which then allowed Google to fix them and make the engine better.

"But seriously - there's a pervading myth in the search engine marketing and optimization industry that if you're a good boy, the engines will pat your head and will reward you with fine rankings, even if it may take an incarnation or two. That's unfortunate because not only does it fuzz up the hardcore technological issues involved, it also attracts all sorts of gut level thinkers to the SEM world, flogging their gut level advice ("content is king" being just one pervasive popular myth in question) and confusing each other and everybody else. This is a basically religious, moralistic attitude, and quite an inadequate one when dealing with technological issues." -- Taken from http://www.searchengineblog.com/interviews/interview_ralph_t...

"If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned."

Not really.

True, you haven't been conned, you've just made two shitty hiring decisions in a row -- paying sone designer or developer who didn't build you a good site, and then paying a snake oil salesman to try and make your troubles disappear.

There's lots of legitimate ways to do SEO. Making the site more crawlable, setting up proper title tags, designing a good robots.txt, etc. Not all SEO is blackhat.

The author calls this "making good websites," and believes that if you run a website at all, you should be forced to learn about all of this stuff, even if your passion is just for writing. Further, he goes on to say its "obvious." By no means do I agree with him, just letting you know how he'd respond (taken from his response to similar comments on the article.)

The problem is, his statement is false:

"Which brings us, finally, to the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free:

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again."

That isn't the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It's A way, and not the easiest way. Maybe he thinks it should be the best or only way. Maybe I think it should be. But it isn't. As long as search engine spammers can make a living, they will continue to spam search engines, and simply declaring that that is "bad" is going to have about as much effect as declaring that dealing drugs or prostituting oneself is "bad" has had on those professions.

This article lost me about half-way down with all of the over-the-top language. Google is not all that is good and just in the world, and those that manipulate its algorithms for their own ends are not all that is evil and base.

Come back when you've gained a bit of nuance.

"Spam" exists in most communication channels.

Telemarketers in call centers. Automated voice messages. Bulk SMS messages. Bluetooth spam. Junk mail. Email spam. Usenet spam. IRC spam. Web spam. Word-of-mouth spam. Celebrity “endorsements”. Street peddlers. Classifieds spam. Flyer spam. Sky writing, flying banners etc. Huge billboards with blinking fucking lights.

I could go on for a while.

Are all of those people evil opportunistic bastard cockroaches?

Yep, pretty much.

Just because preying on ignorance is easy and lucrative does not make it okay.

I'm not very fond of advertising as a practice in general. I'm not trying to say all those practices are ok, just because a lot of people carry them out.

Is the pilot with the flying banner evil?

Is my low-volume, efficient, targeted, semi-automated marketing evil?

How many of you have cold called people? Are you evil?

Is Google evil, trying to cut into every online (and offline) publisher's profit?

Not necessarily evil or bastards, but opportunistic parasites who make their living by making the world worse rather than better. That doesn't make them evil; perhaps they don't see the harm in what they're doing, or perhaps the only alternative is starvation. But it does mean that the world would be better off without what they do.

So essentially advertising is parasitic? Perhaps it is, in a way, but without it your chance of getting noticed is slim to none. In other words, success is parasitic.

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