But in general, the job of SEO's is increasingly being about writing better content and satisfying the user, and less about "tricks". That's true , at least generally.
But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe.
BTW, my fun pet conspiracy theory(everybody should have one!) , is that somewhere deep in the belly of alphabet, they have a secret search engine built for engineers, that nobody knows it exists, even the engineers(it uses a google theme), and it's the key behind their moonshot empire. :)
Are you kidding? Look at the articles posted on HN. MANY are pure marketing or self-promotion pieces designed to be shared on social media like HN, get clicks, and start discussion.
It’s funny how HN commenters only call it seo, clickbait, and marketing if they don’t like it lol.
But would you say the same about the comments ?
But also, we come here mostly for entertainment. And even in our entertainment we prefer a high-quality discussion.
But Google isn't a tool for entertainment. And people here do complain about shitty Google results.
And to be fair, they also complain about the declining quality of HN. But still, it's better than the alternative communities, probably.
Plenty of people who think because they’re paid a lot of money to be computer programmers that they can instantly have genius insights into completely unrelated fields. A good amount of “well actually” when any social issue is discussed. Surprising volume of apologizing for discrimination/racism/sexism/etc. under the guise of “free speech”.
But for me, that's not the reason i come here. I'm more interested in discussion about entrepreneurship and businesses, and some of the commentors are quite good.
Anyone trying to build a scalable business and expecting SEO to play a meaningful role probably doesn’t have a firm grasp on what Google has done over the past 10 years and will continue to do. Most businesses, and their investors, should be calculating what their numbers look like if they were to receive 0 free users from Google.
Maybe true. but it can still, sometimes be an effective tool for small businesses, both in local and organic.
I'm not convinced on this one. It feels like they've ceded the SEO spam war to me. As mentioned in the article, they just crudely exclude large swaths of content now instead of trying to filter out actually bad content.
And they have just generally devalued the organic results in favor of ads, widgets, curated stuff...anything that keeps you walled in to Google owned properties or ads. It's fairly common now to have zero organic results above the fold.