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

Programmatic SEO

zapier.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 26 posts

Re: Programmatic SEO

#11

Post by tootie »

jwie wrote: post #4

SEO is kinda dead. In an honest form it’s “don’t confuse the crawler.” In its actual form it makes the web worse. Even if you create a strategy that works Google will eventually shut it down. It’s an adversarial relationship. The search engines want you to buy ads, not win shelf space. The organizations that can pull off SEO still do it more to suppress competition. It’s not a low cost way to find customers anymore.…

Legitimate SEO is still alive. Gaming SEO is now a losing proposition. I've told stakeholders for at least the last 5 years that writing genuine and relevant content is 90% of the job. Technical SEO is basically a task to not screw up and offend the crawlers. Web vitals is an interesting new twist but it's a better game than AMP was.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#12

Post by janalsncm »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #10
jurassicfoxy wrote: post #7

It's shocking how angry this article makes me. In an era of scummy ad-tech, decreasing search result quality, and explosion of crappy web content, I'd be embarrassed to publish this.

"I'm part of the reason you can't find what you're looking for but I'm getting richer for it, and for now so can you, until the whole of the internet is garbage meant for robots with no value to humans." Yeah. Not my style.

The thing about SEO is, it’s only actually Google Search Optimization. Since Google has such a strong grip on search, the two are currently tightly coupled.

However they don’t need to be. If someone created a niche search engine it would immediately invalidate all of the Google-optimized trash out there. If it solves a specific use case people will probably pay good money for it.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#14

Post by instagraham »

janalsncm wrote: post #12
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm part of the reason you can't find what you're looking for but I'm getting richer for it, and for now so can you, until the whole of the internet is garbage meant for robots with no value to humans." Yeah. Not my style.

The thing about SEO is, it’s only actually Google Search Optimization. Since Google has such a strong grip on search, the two are currently tightly coupled. However they don’t need to be. If someone created a niche search engine it would immediately invalidate all of the Google-optimized trash out there. If it solves a specific use case people will probably pay good money for it.

I already enjoy using phind and Bard a lot more than Google, it solves 90% of use cases I have for niche/troubleshooting knowledge.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#15

Post by andrei_says_ »

tootie wrote: post #11
jwie wrote: post #4

SEO is kinda dead. In an honest form it’s “don’t confuse the crawler.” In its actual form it makes the web worse. Even if you create a strategy that works Google will eventually shut it down. It’s an adversarial relationship. The search engines want you to buy ads, not win shelf space. The organizations that can pull off SEO still do it more to suppress competition. It’s not a low cost way to find customers anymore.…

Legitimate SEO is still alive. Gaming SEO is now a losing proposition. I've told stakeholders for at least the last 5 years that writing genuine and relevant content is 90% of the job. Technical SEO is basically a task to not screw up and offend the crawlers. Web vitals is an interesting new twist but it's a better game than AMP was.

This is my impression / approach, too, and I’m wondering if someone here can bring a solid argument for a better option so I can have my team correct course or reallocate resources.

Ultimately I feel well-written and structured content is a self-solving seo scenario.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#16

Post by rchaud »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #10
jurassicfoxy wrote: post #7

It's shocking how angry this article makes me. In an era of scummy ad-tech, decreasing search result quality, and explosion of crappy web content, I'd be embarrassed to publish this.

"I'm part of the reason you can't find what you're looking for but I'm getting richer for it, and for now so can you, until the whole of the internet is garbage meant for robots with no value to humans." Yeah. Not my style.

Not mine either, but I have noticed on HN that while there's plenty of deserved animus for the ills of adtech, there is little when it comes to the topic of generative AI.

We know that the lowest-hanging fruit use case for gAI will be to pollute the web further with machine-written content and clip art. It isn't to improve anyone's search results, it's to make somebody's bottom line go up, at the expense of the rest of us.

I wish more people would be upset about that. I mean we can already see what's happened to the web via SEO gaming. An even worse fate is coming once gAI really takes off.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#17

Post by rchaud »

janalsncm wrote: post #2

I strongly believe this article was almost entirely generated by a computer.

It's not outside the realms of possibility. Zapier has hundreds of pages on their website titled:

Best CRM apps

Best Notetaking Apps

Best Calendar apps

All to pull in traffic from people searching for those terms.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#19

Post by partiallypro »

tootie wrote: post #11
jwie wrote: post #4

SEO is kinda dead. In an honest form it’s “don’t confuse the crawler.” In its actual form it makes the web worse. Even if you create a strategy that works Google will eventually shut it down. It’s an adversarial relationship. The search engines want you to buy ads, not win shelf space. The organizations that can pull off SEO still do it more to suppress competition. It’s not a low cost way to find customers anymore.…

Legitimate SEO is still alive. Gaming SEO is now a losing proposition. I've told stakeholders for at least the last 5 years that writing genuine and relevant content is 90% of the job. Technical SEO is basically a task to not screw up and offend the crawlers. Web vitals is an interesting new twist but it's a better game than AMP was.

Web vitals have very little impact on SEO though. Some of the top ranked sites have awful scores. Google has never said how much impact it has not I'd bet close to 5%.

Re: Programmatic SEO

#20

Post by guestbest »

jwie wrote: post #4

SEO is kinda dead. In an honest form it’s “don’t confuse the crawler.” In its actual form it makes the web worse. Even if you create a strategy that works Google will eventually shut it down. It’s an adversarial relationship. The search engines want you to buy ads, not win shelf space. The organizations that can pull off SEO still do it more to suppress competition. It’s not a low cost way to find customers anymore.…

It’s funny but websites actually compete with Google, since Google wants to keep users in the search engine and not clicking on a web search link, Google will summarize the site’s content to the search query such that the user will not clink on the link to leave the Google search engine
Post reply on HN