Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

I get a lot of search engine traffic to my blog, with the following strategy:

Stage 1: Technical - Clean up your act.

If you structure your site properly and make it accessible, search engines will crawl and index it properly. Make your content accessible from a technical standpoint.

Clean up your HTML

Make your URLs reflect your content, cleanly

Build and submit sitemaps

Make the navigation on your website simple and effective

Make your website load quickly

Stage 2: Content - Make great stuff.

If you build great content, people will share it. They will link to you.

Build great content

Make things that help people

Stay within a niche if you can

Create content that helps people, even if you're giving a little of your service away. (For example, a roofing company featuring an article about how to choose a roof, even if it sends them to your competitor, or some DIY stuff)

If you do these things, you'll do well in search engines. I'm oversimplifying a bit, but this is way more effective than keyword stuffing, link purchasing, etc.

Just keep it honest.

This is not true. Google has been gamed for well over a decade.

On a past enterprise, I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" and paid a content writer for about 9 months. She posted lengthy original content about 3 times per week, all highly relevant to the search terms we cared about. I did the same about once a week.

A competitor with a private blog network and professional spam apparatus started outranking us just with "link building", i.e., posting links on the PBN they controlled, within 1 month of launching (we had about 15 months of content at this point). They had no content on their site at all, just a landing page that included a few of the keywords they were using in their link building. There was no blog, there was no "well-written, honest content for humans".

Google had no qualms ranking them based on the link text despite their lack of supporting content. This competitor brutally beat us in organic search traffic until both businesses were shut down due to legal threats from a F500 cowering behind the CFAA.

Our blog is still online. There is no significant search traffic to speak of. While the content may have aged some, it's still the best resource for a lot of the things we posted about. It's buried pretty deep on Google's search.

Transparent spam and plagiarized content are easy for Google to detect, but private blog networks are a major component of modern SEO, as are several other non-organic schemes that Google has no simple algorithmic method to detect (barring slip-ups that make it obvious, though even in those cases, Google seems reluctant to punish domestic PBNs). I know of entire offices staffed with "link builders" whose entire job is to figure out how to get backlinks, and to be fair, "write really good original content" is somewhere on their list, but it's not very close to the top.

Just a counterpoint. "SEO" is still a thing. Google is a high-value target and it's worth a lot of money to game them. It is quite naive to believe that they're impervious to it. You can rank OK with "honest, well-written content for humans" as long as no professionals are competing with you.

Agreed. Google is certainly advanced, but it certainly isn't fair, despite what their guidelines tell content writers and webmasters.

Google wants people to write high-quality, relevant content, so they altered their guidelines to simply tell everyone to write high-quality, relevant content. Yet, just as the YouTube lottery exists -- where two creators can produce videos of similar quality and one sees enormous success and the other doesn't -- there's probably a ranking lottery.

And at the end of the day, if a content moderator or employee at Google likes your content, you'll have a better chance at ranking regardless of quality.