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Comment by bitmapbrother | Hacker News Reader

I'd ask you to cite your claims, but we both know you can't. It's a pity your issues with Google cause you to pollute discussions with BS.

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Do a Google search for anything even slightly obscure, and you're likely to find the first page or so of results filled with highly-SEO'd sites that offer little in the way of deep, detailed content. The smaller sites which do have that content, but just haven't been SEO'd much, have been eclipsed. They're still there, but rendered nearly inaccessible.

Interesting discussion on a search engine that does sort of the opposite of Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3910304

I hear this a lot, but I'd love to see an example (especially including the sites that should rank).

This may or may not be what you're looking for, but my freelance site just can't hit the front page in my industry when dozens of highly funded agencies can dominate it. I've published a 50k word industry-specific book on my site, have SEO'd as much as possible and have an older domain than those better funded. Won't link to it here, but it seems to be a real issue to me.

If a search engine let you differentiate and sort between content match vs pagerank match vs Adwords spend we might be able to mitigate the issue somewhat.

btw, your site's redirect to the HTTPS version doesn't seem to work correctly in Firefox, Safari, or IE. After reading your comment, I was curious to learn more. When I typed in just your domain name plus CMD+ENTER (which adds "www." and ".com" to the address bar text in Firefox), I got a 404 page, not the 301 redirect to the HTTPS site. When I add "http://", the redirect seems to work.

This.

I don't work in this area, but I'd say that 99% of the time I hear someone complaining about how Google is favoring sites that pay for advertising over them I find that they are making these incredibly basic errors.

For me, http://www.linguaquote.com/ gives a 404. It's only when I go to https://www.linguaquote.com/ that it works.

That's all well and good, and thanks for checking, but I wasn't referring to that site in the parent comment. The other site does have SSL enabled, but only recently and via Let's Encrypt. The issue is much longer standing than this.

So I'm afraid it's not quite as simple as you make out in this case.

In other news, I've just pinpointed the missing line in the recently changed nginx config for Linguaquote; the http://www block had it's redirect commented out. Still, for this site in particular Google Webmaster tools is set up for the https version where no errors have been reported and SSL Labs gave an A+ for the stapling, PFS, heartbleed etc. etc. efforts I went to. I don't think this redirect was having an adverse effect on ranking, but I don't expect this site to hit the front page just yet - much more content to add before aiming for that.

Is it bad form to quote myself?

I'd love to see an example (especially including the sites that should rank).

I put the link to the freelance site in my profile, which I only mentioned in my reply to cpeterso above - apologies for not making it clearer.

Will leave it there a bit longer in case you do come back to this thread as still genuinely interested in your opinion on the matter.

Thanks for letting me know, and for the more detailed info - the redirect worked for the basic permutations I tested for (www.domain.com, and http://domain.com etc.) but I am redirecting non-www and www traffic to https://www. in Nginx. (Solution found, see edit below.)

I'd not heard of the CMD+ENTER method before, so thanks for the heads up. Still not entirely sure what Firefox is submitting in that case. Will test.

I wasn't referring to this site in the parent comment, but to my freelance site. I'll put that site in my profile for 24 hours just in case anyone wants to take a look.

EDIT: Fixed, as noted in reply to nl's comments. A recent change led to a redirect line being mistakenly commented out.

One example I've experienced is searching for iphone jailbreak related stuff. Perhaps that's to be expected.

If you've ever read about the original PageRank algorithm, the parent post is a pretty reasonable way to describe it.

I have no idea what the current algorithm looks like but I'd be shocked if it somehow switched to evaluating the 'quality' of content, however one might do that with an algorithm.

Well they do have some quality metrics, like duplication with other content, words used and so on. I suspect more, eg writing style measurements, correlated with other things that are found useful. There is a lot that could be done without actually understanding the content, although if course it can be gamed.

The primary measurement used for Google's PageRank algorithm is the number and "value" of backlinks that a page has. The "value" of a backlink is determined by the cumulative number of descendent sub-backlinks that it has. This is common knowledge among SEO professionals.

Basically, when judging quality, Google is making assumptions like: "This page has a lot of backlinks, and those backlinks themselves have a lot of backlinks... Therefore this page is of high quality." This approach puts all the power in the hands of content providers (bloggers) who are funded by big companies (or well-funded startups) and who serve the interests of those companies.

Google wrongly assumes that content-providers serve the interest of consumers and that they can be trusted - Which is not the case.

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