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Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More
#22"The tricks to beat and spam Google, Whalen said, no longer work as well." LOL. I know a half dozen guys who build millions of automated links every day. They say an easy term and they're in the top 5 results after 5 days, a hard term (a variety of diet pills, etc.) and it takes them a month. They get manually banned from time to time, but they just pull another URL from their pool and start over. It's gotten more so…
Hey Austen, if you'd be interested in sharing any specifics (companies, keywords, people, etc.) regarding people spamming by leaving millions of links gumming up the web, my team would be happy to investigate in more detail.
Surely this is something trivial to identify internally for you guys?
Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More
#23I might be able to take comments like "rewarding content more" seriously if w3schools wasn't still at the top of almost every HTML, CSS, and JavaScript search query. I realized one day that I just use Google to quickly navigate a few websites I actually do use. This is something like the 99.9% case. At that point, I realized my search queries where I include the website I want and keywords I want to find in that site…
Your Google isn't my Google. We're all in a bubble tailored to our interests and habits. It feels awkward to use the engine when someone else's computer - especially non-tech people.
Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More
#24Google only works well for English content. It is broken for other languages other than English. In my case, front page is full of spam content for a Turkish keyword that I want to compete. Even some sites are stealing my own unique content and somehow they are achieving better results than me. I suspect that Google needs more semantic data about language itself. I believe it will become more sophisticated as time go…
If you can remember some example queries I'd love to pass them on to the team.
Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More
#25Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More
#26I am still a little confused on SEO and as this is a very slow last train home I would like to add some notes to my HN Evernote
1. I have never ranked well for anything until last year. Then suddenly a OSS project with about three articles got to the front page for "ORacle ODI source control". But it got there through a comment on a LinkedIn page.
I literally went back to the comment and said "BTW this solution now has a website here it is" and we ranked. admittedly no-one ever visits the site but we live in hope.
I mention this because it kinda-sorta reflects the good and evil twins of even white hat SEO.
1. Good side: we are / were building a genuinely useful OSS product (it puts source control into an oracle ETL product that has none). It has (yet!) no commercial upside to it but we just want it to succeed because. I have written a couple of articles saying what and why (odietamo.org.uk) but mostly it's hard to persuade people who are drowning that breathing water is not a normal state of affairs.
3. evil side - I went comment spamming. Shoved my link into a year old comment thread (admittedly that we had participated on a year ago but without a site to link to then) And afaik, it worked.
Now we are an incredibly low volume keyword search (IIRC it's "ODI source control" or "odi version control") so any good inbound link will have some big metric but even so
I think google is doing a good job because that search turns up a minimal amount of spam and a couple of threads and discussions - but it bothers me that comment spam in group forums can have such an outsized effect.
good remarkable content ought to rise to the top - but I am not sure if I know what is good content not if good content can be outweighed by other co-incidental metrics. (NB none of this is to do with link farms and blackhat SEO - just bumbling along white hat stuff)
PS if my site only ranks for my bubble and readers here simply cannot find it, please let me know.
Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More
#27"The tricks to beat and spam Google, Whalen said, no longer work as well." LOL. I know a half dozen guys who build millions of automated links every day. They say an easy term and they're in the top 5 results after 5 days, a hard term (a variety of diet pills, etc.) and it takes them a month. They get manually banned from time to time, but they just pull another URL from their pool and start over. It's gotten more so…
Practicing "SEO" of 10+ years here.
Yes, that's black hat SEO. It's very different from the Search Engine Land world. The idea is burn/rinse/repeat of sketchy affiliate sites, people make a very good living off it. Even still. Matt Cutts can surely find all he needs to know about that world on Black Hat World, I don't think that these guys are keeping much from them. But I also don't think it's easy for them to fix without potentially having negative consequences for the rest of the world.
The flip-side of this is the "white hat SEO" world. I don't know about Jill's own practices, but the conference/publication world with which she's a part of is frequented by people like Matt Cutts. And I think she hits the nail on the head for that: it's driven by content/PR now. There is still a place for on-page SEO for a corporate site if you're strong with the technical stuff (for example, schema.org type stuff is just getting off the ground with the Google Knowledge Graph). But it's not the sexy / easy to sell fast salvation that it once was.
Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More
#28"The tricks to beat and spam Google, Whalen said, no longer work as well." LOL. I know a half dozen guys who build millions of automated links every day. They say an easy term and they're in the top 5 results after 5 days, a hard term (a variety of diet pills, etc.) and it takes them a month. They get manually banned from time to time, but they just pull another URL from their pool and start over. It's gotten more so…
> "The tricks to beat and spam Google, Whalen said, no longer work as well." > It's gotten more sophisticated and therefore is more difficult sounds like you agree
No necessarily. Just because it may be more difficult to achieve doesn't mean it is less effective. The process is more specialized now surely and yet the niche remains. We know that when supply is constrained the price rises. So it may now be even more profitable for fewer players.
Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More
#29I might be able to take comments like "rewarding content more" seriously if w3schools wasn't still at the top of almost every HTML, CSS, and JavaScript search query. I realized one day that I just use Google to quickly navigate a few websites I actually do use. This is something like the 99.9% case. At that point, I realized my search queries where I include the website I want and keywords I want to find in that site…
I love w3schools. It's extremely beginner friendly informative and great.
The information is clearly presented and easy to scan/parse.