41–50 of 106 posts
Years ago a Google engineer on HN infamously said something to the effect of "Google considers SEO / free traffic a BUG" - somebody have that link handy?
Matt Cutts answers the question: "Does Google consider SEO to be spam?"
If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing cultur…
Yes, you are taking on a big platform risk in that your business depends on Google continuing to serve you high amounts of traffic. Does that mean "you will go extinct one way or another", heck no.
Risk management is a big part of building a business. Just because there's a low chance that you could lose a significant chunk of your revenue overnight doesn't mean the business isn't worth starting.
Every company has risk (AWS, Stripe, npm, etc, etc, etc).
I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content. Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously s…
This. Not only for SEO but in general I'd love to see the sources to stuff I read, especially in news articles, which often do not link to anything. It would also be great for content discovery as a reader.
Please please please let it fix the way searching for recipes turns up the most awful, painful drivel at the top of the rankings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who decides what is good and what is inferior?
Google, of course. And they're trying to please both their consumers and customers, but more focused on consumers, because there's always another customer.
I got what you meant but I think you have the words flipped. Google's customers are advertisers and the consumers of their products are users like you and me.
> With apologies, I have taken this post down: it has attracted a lot more attention than I expected, and I need to reconsider what I want to say on this topic.
This article no longer has any content: "POST REMOVED"
I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content. Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously s…
If I had to make a really uninformed guess, the problem isn't identifying junk, but identifying what can be classified as junk without hurting their bottom line.
Because it's really easy as a user. Ratio of ads (or unrelated data) to content.