Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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By following common sense, good design, and doing some research and reading about Google's suggestions to web developers.

Put down the coolaid.

Seriously -- Google is a business. They make money by selling the results of an algorithm. There's nothing magic or sacred about Google's algorithm. It makes mistakes. They blackball people. Even more critical, links are not a necessary and sufficient reason for an article to be the best thing I want to see. It's just a guessing game that works most of the time for most people.

If I had a cure for cancer that worked, and I put it on a website with a new domain tomorrow, and never SEO'd it, who do you think would come by?

Bupkis. Zero. Zilch. Nobody.

Good SEO is marketing. Marketing is a good thing. We need people to do things to bring to our attention stuff we might like. Google is not about to take the place of all marketing -- maybe that was a dream years ago but it's turned out to just be a fantasy on Google's part.

If you found a cure for cancer and only put it on a website, maybe noone would find it.

But if you also mentioned it to a few people (especially a doctor or cancer victim) then it would be featured in news articles, broadcast, tweeted etc. because it's a big deal. Soon your website would appear first in any relevant search.

Unless the doctor copied it to their website and told the media about that website instead ... simple isn't it.

It might and it might not.

That's the thing -- sure, perhaps all good ideas get great publicity and links simply because they're good ideas.

And perhaps all good business ideas make their owners lots of money simply because they're good ideas.

And perhaps all articles get referenced and linked based on their degree of usefulness to the world.

But in the real world, somebody has to go out and peddle ideas. That's marketing, sales, networking -- whatever you want to call it. Nowadays google is forcing us to go comment on other people's blogs, link-trade, and lord knows what else.

Good ideas simply don't always become popular simply because they're good and you tell a few people. It takes a lot more work than that.

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