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Sick of SEO Scumbags

thehodge.co.uk

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Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#91

Post by thehodge »

languagehacker wrote: post #67

Damn, this is some bad writing. I know we live in an age of post-editorial content, but can we please avoid sharing stuff with gratuitous comma splices and "your" vs. "you're" confusion? If I wanted to read shit like that, I'd open up the comments on Reddit.

I'm sorry that you found the post hard to read, I do have a tendency to get there and their and the others mixed up and my writing style is a bit, strange but a lot of people don't seem to mind and get used to it, I am trying to improve with each post.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#92

Post by duskwuff »

EwanToo wrote: post #32
tlrobinson wrote: post #17

What exactly is "link building"? That itself sounds pretty scumbaggy to me... In an ideal world (white hat) SEO should include things that make the site better for their users and search engines, and hopefully improve search rankings organically. "Building" links in order to increase PageRank sounds like it's manipulating the system.

From what I understand, link building, in the semi-legitimate form at least, is contacting bloggers and journalists and saying "Hey, you might really like product X, here's a 30 day trial", sending out press releases, making sure you're in the legitimate directories like yell.com in the UK, etc. The illegitimate end of is is using hacked forums, wordpress blogs, etc, to post links with exactly the keywords you want t…

And from experience, I can tell you that most "link building" is the spammy type. On a good day, it'll merely be sending out a ton of "link exchange" request emails (a practice which Google also frowns upon, btw).

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#93

Post by EvilTerran »

martinced wrote: post #45

The double-talk on HN never ceases to amaze me. On one day Google is close to dying and there are lots of alternatives out there and on the next day the very same people are writing that "SEO = Google pagerank ownage" as if Google was the one and only search engine which mattered. So which is it? Are Google's days numbered or not?

Can you point to any instances of the same person holding both positions?

People commenting here are allowed to disagree with each other, you know, and not everyone comments on every link.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#94

Post by bones6 »

tripzilch wrote: post #75
a5seo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but everything you say about SEO can be said of PR. The difference is that PR is a more mature field and people understand what it's about. It probably also helps that few have the attitude that they are entitled to news coverage the same way they feel entitled to traffic. So we accept that it's capricious and that someone who knows what they're doing can get results. And that's OK. Anyway, who care…

So, just for a laugh, crazy idea: say I have a site that I don't want to be on the search engines, but I still want people to be able to link to it etc, so no just putting it behind a login, I can do the above? Duplicate all sorts of crappy content, making sure in particular to mention the words "viagra" and "casino" a lot?

Ya you could easily do that and get blacklisted by Google and most USA search engines. Make the text the same color as the background, really tiny in the corner somewhere and spam it up. Though you could simply edit your robots.txt if you don't want to appear on the search engines. At least the ones who respect that. If a link to the site is found by a spider, the cat is out of the bag so to speak. Nothing can put it back in the box.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#95

Post by MartinCron »

thehodge wrote: post #91
languagehacker wrote: post #67

Damn, this is some bad writing. I know we live in an age of post-editorial content, but can we please avoid sharing stuff with gratuitous comma splices and "your" vs. "you're" confusion? If I wanted to read shit like that, I'd open up the comments on Reddit.

I'm sorry that you found the post hard to read, I do have a tendency to get there and their and the others mixed up and my writing style is a bit, strange but a lot of people don't seem to mind and get used to it, I am trying to improve with each post.

This might be my failing, but the your/you're confusion is something that always makes me question the worth of what I'm reading. Which is a shame, because it was a good post otherwise.

I'm glad you're trying to improve with each post. The way to get better at writing is to write.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#96

Post by bones6 »

Angostura wrote: post #80
trevelyan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Google wants your content to rank on its own merits. At risk of sounding bitter, this is really not the best advice to share with any group of startup entrepreneurs who might believe it and stake their business model on it. As with many of us here, I've struggled with this iss…

> the reality is that Google is a saturated distribution channel that is horrible at identifying quality content that is not heavily branded or pushed in mainstream media. I'm really not sure I agree. My sister in law is a french tutor in a small English town. She wanted a Web site and I suggested that she put something together using Weebly. I did some basics with her to ensure that reasonable keywords appeared in t…

In my opinion this really is the easiest way for quality content to rank and I highly recommend it. However, and not to downplay how nice this must be for your sister, but these are relatively obscure terms that don't get many hits. If you are trying to rank on some of the hottest money making keywords on the web, the type with a 6 to 7 figure payday, then you are on a totally different level of difficulty. Orders of magnitude different. Old domains with old content are heavily weighted. New guys have little to no chance. Only extreme viral content can achieve that and hope to be white hat. It looks effortless in the wild but in practice you have a lot of work to do to link-bait and that's still hit and miss. That's why a lot of "SEOs" turn to black hat, and churn and chew up the search engines to scrape whatever they can.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#98

Post by bones6 »

Silhouette wrote: post #85
cbeach wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A search engine that ranks mainly on social-graph recommendation might be one solution, because the social graph is a simple data structure that transcends "ownership" by Facebook or Google+. The engine itself is a non-trivial system to implement, mind you.

The trouble with this idea is that Google can't magically see private links/recommendations on social networks any more than anyone else can. For example, one site I help with has just a few inbound links from low PR sites as far as Google is concerned, and gets a page rank of zero accordingly. In reality, it probably gets more inbound links via social networking in a single day on most days, and unsurprisingly those…

In your example, I see it like this: Google sees those links and gives low page rank but quantity helps too. So if you're getting a bunch of links on social media, it follows that eventually people will blog about it (crawlable content) and link back to the site. Sure it may be a crappy blogger blog but it's legit and Google does count that. Over time a ton of non-spam PR0 backlinks can and will help rank for search terms. Of course, getting some big PageRank links will help a lot more and if you have any say in the matter, can help with what keyword you rank for.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#99

Post by pseut »

Silhouette wrote: post #85
cbeach wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A search engine that ranks mainly on social-graph recommendation might be one solution, because the social graph is a simple data structure that transcends "ownership" by Facebook or Google+. The engine itself is a non-trivial system to implement, mind you.

The trouble with this idea is that Google can't magically see private links/recommendations on social networks any more than anyone else can. For example, one site I help with has just a few inbound links from low PR sites as far as Google is concerned, and gets a page rank of zero accordingly. In reality, it probably gets more inbound links via social networking in a single day on most days, and unsurprisingly those…

> Google's basic premise of ranking the importance of a site based on how many links it gets and where from is wildly inaccurate in the era of social networking. Normal people mostly don't run their own public web sites or blogs any more, they share stuff on sites like Facebook and often only with their "friends".

I'm not sure that I understand this point. I thought that Google wants to index Twitter (for example) but is prohibited by Twitter. So it's hard to see that their premise is wrong: personal recommendations on social networks are just inbound links from specific sites, just not sites that Google can index.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#100

Post by James_Duval »

Nursie wrote: post #57
James_Duval wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what a lot of modern SEO is, actually. I think we'll see increasing amounts of information made available by private companies over this next year in an effort to rank higher for their key phrases. Also genuinely useful tools/web apps/calculators. The rest is site structure. I know people can and do still game the system, but that's not a good long-term plan and it's a flat return. Creating a good site with g…

It sounds like a strange motivator to make good content for the wrong reasons...

Yes, I agree, it's a strange industry, and many of the people involved in creating good content for it end up deeply conflicted.
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