111–120 of 229 posts
Considering how much HN loves to complain about Google, they sure also love to tear holes into not Google.
People rarely comment online when they like something. People with opposing or differing opinions tend to be over represented since the same people are more likely to be vocal about their feelings.
From their About Yep page: "We built Yep from the ground up so that we can give 90% of ad revenue to content creators." And yet there is nowhere around the site explaining how creators can claim that "revenue".
Think SEO spam is a problem now? Wait until "creators" are paid per their SERP
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I worked for a company in the SEO space a bit over a decade ago, initially to try and learn the things you call out above. My surprise at the time was to discover most of the snake oil being sold as “SEO” was nothing more than basic usability 101 stuff. Make sure titles are descriptive. Try to use terms that your readers would use and recognise to ensure the content resonates. Structure your content in a sensible way…
I also worked at a SEO company but not with a goal, although I also left there disgusted with the practice. The issue however (IMO) is that there's SEO at the article level and SEO at a strategic level. At the article level, it is indeed mostly harmless, except when they catch some Google bias such as removing dates and edit notices from blog posts (because evergreen articles supposedly rank better), force a certain…
The biggest problem was feeling like a bad human and not wanting to tell my friends about how I made money on my side hustle. I am really glad I sold those sites and left SEO behind.
My side hustle now is writing FOSS.
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>this site gives you the very metrics which every so called SEOer uses to game Google search results Seems a little harsh. People would be trying to game the search results with or without the metrics. They're just selling a shovel though. The ad industry and its money is the root cause behind the gold rush, not the shovel seller.
No one is ever to blame for anything in economics. The ad industry isn’t a person or thing with any ethics bound to it. It’s just a creation of the market. You may as well try blaming the air for being responsible for tornados. The only solution is to try to build a new system that can’t be abused.
I think there is something to be said of the ethics of participating in some markets.
Ahrefs is the biggest reason why Google results are so bad nowadays. While they call it SEO, this site gives you the very metrics which every so called SEOer uses to game Google search results (and it's very good tbh). I hope they are ready to face the seo monster they have created and yep can't be gamed as easily.
It’s not exactly their fault for noticing a valuable problem and solving it though. Google is the reason the incentive exists in the first place, no?
Why not? And they didn't solve the problem, they exploited the problem.
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Been using ahrefs for years, not sure what is sleazy about it. It audits your site for issues, shows Google rankings for keywords, estimated volume for keywords, backlinks to specific sites, backlinks to specific pages...etc. It doesn't do anything for SEO (no content, no links...etc), it simply reports on the state of affairs.
SEO itself is sleazy. Any gaming of search is sleazy, whether active or passive. The NSA is sleazy, even though they simply report on "the state of affairs".
Google even lists it as a required skill for some of their roles:
https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/83882884131103430-pr...
I don't trust Ahrefs at all. The whole SEO industry is tainted, and Ahrefs is not a good part of it. I don't want a search engine that pays "creators" (a search engine finds things, if they want to monetize it it is after it is found). I want a search engine that runs exactly as many ads as are needed to pay for itself, nothing more. Preferably with an option to pay for myself as an option. I'm guessing that means ht…
This needs to be higher up. If you go to the about section of Yep.com, you can see this is powered by the "Ahrefs" bot (not just for sourcing crawler data but also run by the same people). Ahrefs is a sleazy "SEO tool" ( https://ahrefs.com/pricing ) that basically exists to exploit weaknesses in search engine algorithms and other shady things (and make lots of money doing it -- $99/mo to $999/mo).
These days it's really following guidelines, creating content that people want to see and is useful to searchers, linking to sources, etc.
Our system is big part custom OCaml code and also employs third-party technologies - Debian, ELK, Puppet, and anything else that will solve the task at hand. In this role, be prepared to deal with 25 petabytes storage cluster, 2,000 bare-metal servers, experimental large-scale deployments and all kinds of software bugs and hardware deviations on a daily basis. Company is based in Singapore, but where are the servers?…
Let's see... Under their proposed profit share, if they achieved DDG levels of traffic (100M queries/day, assuming $0.01 per query in net ads profit, that is $900k/day distributed among conservatively speaking 10M creators/sites) distribution would be $0.09 /day to an average content creator owning an average site. It does not sound much. If it was to magically fully replace Google tomorrow (10B queries/day) it would…
Inciting the notion that they're individually responsible for the whole of content creators' income only encourages more ads or even nefarious behavior -- which is completely antithetical to your own company's philosophy, so it's not clear why you're so publicly holding a competitor to a different standard.
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SEO itself is sleazy. Any gaming of search is sleazy, whether active or passive. The NSA is sleazy, even though they simply report on "the state of affairs".
SEO is a skill set that helps algorithms understand content. Google even lists it as a required skill for some of their roles: https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/83882884131103430-pr...
I don't know if I'd use Google as a great example of sleazy vs non-sleazy...