61–70 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?
- Do not depend on google for most of your traffic. If you have alternate organic sources of traffic Google will automatically give you more importance. - You need to have a social media presence. Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are important. It is okay even if it is just some automated posting. - Your content must be shared by people. If you are not writing share-worthy content please reconsider. (Of course a click bait article will be shared more and a well thought research article will be shared less, compare yourself with your competitors on this metric.)
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 SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map.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…
> POST REMOVED > 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.
I respect the author in making this bold move of removing this. I would be interested in knowing what the updated views are.
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…
> A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine. Hey, I am working on basically this. E.g.: https://findka.com/u/jobryant (warning, takes ~10 seconds to load fully). You make a profile, add your top article/book/movie/music/etc recommen…
The hard problem to solve is how do you get the absolute experts on the platform... and how do you get them to altruistically collaborate in the spirit of Wikipedia and the early web?
The opportunity is massive if you can solve this.
Take any sub niche of the internet / real world.
If you can find a way to get the 5 most intellectually influential people the subject to have their own profiles and work together to collaboratively manage a collection of important information for their community you've got a great asset platform.
If your platform does this repeatably and expands to a lot of other niches... you've got a unicorn startup on your hands because you now have a foundation for a search engine based on expert curation.
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…
Follow up thought here. There was a huge shift in the mindset of the average webmaster between 2006 and 2012 that preceded the legendary "Penguin" and "Panda" updates. Running a website went from being a funky, cool thing to do if you were passionate about tech to something you did because you wanted to build a business. Somewhere in there, people got privy to the value of links (blog comment spam was insane) and peo…
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…
We used to call that DMOZ. Maybe it should be brought back.
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…
Social media is not a replacement for a great web presence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [..] I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. 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.
Doesn't google penalize websites for having too-many outgoing links? That would explain why you're seeing so few links to sources.
I don't get how companies can blame Google for loss of traffic. Google is going to do what it thinks will produce the best results. And if you somehow think that gives you a right to show up in those results or be there if you benefited from showing up in results in the past, that's flawed thinking.
Did you read the article?