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Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

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41–50 of 127 posts

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#41
post #25

SEO works but actual focused content is better.

Thats what I thought was SEO.

Everything Calories Per Dollar bring in hundreds of people to my website a day. As a result, I studied more restaurants Calories Per Dollar, studied Calcium Per Dollar, and other things like Caffeine Per Dollar.

All relevant to my website, all quality content IMO. Google is easily my best source of traffic.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#42

SEO works, and always will. However, trying to figure out the latest tricks is a losing game. Even if you do figure out how to make something work today, algorithms will change and you'll be punished for having gamed the system. Instead, write 'honest' content. Write it well. Write it for humans. If you find yourself adding content in hopes the search engine will pick it up, that is a short-term gain for long-term pa…

This is it. I was a seo person in the early 2000s and, like now, it was lot of snake oil.

The one thing that is timeless, that works, is good content.

If you write good content you will get far.

Flooding pages with keywords and link farms doesn't get you anywhere in the long run.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#43
If you have industry knowledge (outside of tech) you can rank very well for expert content because the stuff you need to beat is often written purely for SEO benefit by someone who's done 30 minutes of research and then bluffed their way through it.

From what I see, in the UK at least, small businesses aren't doing this. Either they can't be bothered or are afraid of giving away knowledge they think they could be charging for?

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#44
post #16
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must explain why w3schools is always at the top of my search results. /s

What's wrong with w3schools?

W3fools used to have more detail:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110117085131/http://w3fools.co...

Even if w3schools have fixed all these instances since then, that all those errors were ever produced is a bad sign, especially when there were better alternatives even then.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#45
At it's core SEO boils down to a protocol for helping search engines make sense of your website/content. If you look at it that way, then yes SEO still works in 2018.

But more often than not, SEO is an umbrella term which encapsulates both the good and the bad practices. Given the work Google and others have done on weeding out the latter using ML/AI as well as human intervention [0] I would say you can't be sure whether those would work. It's contingent on Search Engines being aware of the practice and penalizing that behavior. So it may work today but not guaranteed to work tomorrow.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#47

I'm a little biased because I currently work as an SEO Manager at an agency, but I would say yes. It REALLY depends on the type of business, what stage the business is at, their goals, and probably a few other things. SEO should almost always be a part of a larger overall marketing strategy. If you're an ecommerce shop optimizing product and category pages - SEO will help. If you're a plumber and ranking higher than…

Give us some more counter-examples? Where will SEO definitely not help?

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#48
Yes, at least for Japanese.

Currently, most Japanese Google search results are garbages. It's all boilarplate texts(but produced by very cheap human labor writers so you can't easily filter it out) with keywords in it.

SEO won, Google lost.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#50
SEO is more interesting now that search engines are seeking greater engagement and insight on user preferences. I maintain a small application at http://prettydiff.com/ and both Google and DuckDuckGo have widgets or features available that come up in the search results depending upon the search terms.

This saves the user time because they may get what they need directly from the intelligent search engine result data so that they don't have to enter my site. On the other hand Google makes deep links into the site immediately available as "sub-results" so that a user can enter the site more directly without wasting time on an entry point.

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