Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 318 posts

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#131

Post by alvah »

zenincognito wrote: post #25

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents. Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bri…

SEO still isn't dying, but low DR niche sites built for Amazon commissions and display ads, where the owner & writers have little- to no domain expertise, have been holed below the waterline by Google's latest updates. Correctly so IMO. From what I've heard, ecommerce, small business SEO etc. are unaffected.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#132

Post by antod »

okdood64 wrote: post #90
fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch with how the vast majority of people use the internet.

Is it wrong to want to be even further out of touch?

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#134

Post by mcmoor »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #94
gretch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head: Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong some exec: It's the same thing! I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicti…

You want to be early, just not too early. For trading, obviously if Michael was 2 days early, that may have not been enough time to arrange the contracts he did. 2 years early means paying premiums while explaining to investors why you are doing this weird thing that everyone else in the world disagrees with.

It reminds me of a MinuteEarth video that the sweet spot of disaster prediction is around 2 days before. Shorter and it's useless, longer and you can't really evacuate people for it.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#135

Post by omoikane »

heshiebee wrote: post #5

This article is surprisingly(for the Verge) unbiased, really well written and balanced. The title is definitely misleading making it seem like the author will be taking the authoritarian side. 100% worth the read.

Which title? The one visible on the page is "The people who ruined the internet", but the one in the tag is "Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge".

The current title on HN is "As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?"

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#136

Post by brucethemoose2 »

ipaddr wrote: post #67
legitster wrote: post #64

My first job out of college was writing SEO articles for [unnamed failed startup]. It was exactly the sort of daft, fluffy, "let me Google that for you" content you would think a 20 something SEO writer would come up with. And it's these kinds of fluffy, non-clickbait content that people are complaining about when they talk about Google's search results these days. I don't think the real problem are two-bit hustlers…

People are still contributing at a higher rate but google isn't including them. That's the difference not that suddenly professionals are fleeing because of something that has been happened since the beginning.

I dunno. In the few areas I think I know something, I contribute on GitHub and... Thats about it?

Most of what I am interested in has moved to Discord or Telegram, or rotted away in deteriorating subreddits. A few others niches moved to YouTube, a spammy one way window. Any contribution I make just feels like shouting into the void (and not even the satisfying kind like here on HN).

Is this not a common sentiment?

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#137

Post by dboreham »

wslh wrote: post #81
zenincognito wrote: post #25

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents. Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bri…

> SEO agency owner here Could we speak? I run a bootstrapped company for more than two decades and [natural] SEO explained part of our growth. Nowadays it is not working as expected after trying a lot of stuff and agencies. It feels like we can write articles all day without moving the needle except peaks sharing in Reddit that go down quickly. It seems like I need to apply a giant budget to move those metrics. I und…

> It seems like I need to apply a giant budget to move those metrics

The plan is working.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#138

Post by dboreham »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #32

It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are apparently allergic to having a human ever decide anything ever. It's just that if I were them, with an infinite data lake to find the vendors' traces, trillion-dollar C-suite morals and the SEO was messing with the bottom line, there would be no quarter when a nest is uncovered. Delist ev…

> SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring...

That could be because their interests are aligned. Google makes money from ad spend, not from delivering useful results to users.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#139

Post by charcircuit »

smeagull wrote: post #55
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #6

The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.

Get this - you can have an anonymous facebook and linkedin account too.

It is against linkedin's policies to use a fake name. While facebook accounts require a real name you can create additonal profiles that use pseudodnyms and can not be traced back to your real name.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#140

Post by acheron »

ethbr1 wrote: post #76
gretch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head: Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong some exec: It's the same thing! I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicti…

HN (and futurists in general) tend to significantly underweight inertia. People hate change, and absent a catalyzing event or order of magnitude advantage, it will take a decade for usage patterns to shift. E.g. Kagi over Google Kagi could hypothetically be 25% superior in all searches. Most people don't know and don't care. Search is the thing that pops up and they type into. You can even change that? To what? There…

> Most people don't know and don't care. Search is the thing that pops up and they type into. You can even change that? To what? There are others?

So we’re all still using Yahoo and Altavista?

Post reply on HN