Ask HN: How to be successful online without SEO bullshittery? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to be successful online without SEO bullshittery?

149 pointsrkalla61 comments

This is a hot topic near and dear to my heart.

I create a site 4 years ago that I've been writing on every since... there are probably near 2000 articles on it. Everything from fixing your MTU settings on your Q1000 modem to Java framework tips I find handy to years worth of game and movies reviews to hilarious cat pictures.

It's just anything and everything I've ever found interesting written in a slightly more professional manner than "stream of thought" with a small amount of attention paid to titles and internal links only when appropriate and valuable (I HATE how sites like Engadget inner-link every keyword for Google sake).

My understanding was always that "If I wrote it, they will come".

4 years later and that's not the case at all... I seem to be hitting a goddamn glass ceiling that I cannot figure out for the life of me why it exists or who is imposing it and I want to scream.

This topic on Reddit recently: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_game_digg_using_infographics_voting/

Got my ire up... then combined with typical junk search results I see on Google in any given day for a legit topic I'm searching for and I'm coming to the conclusion that you just can't win online unless you are an SEO-douchebag.

When was the last time you searched for something technical and found a CNET link and headed over only to notice it's a landing page that says "We didn't review this BUT we reviewed..." and has 97 links to other things on the site?

What the fuck.

Is this the only way to succeed now with this content diarrhea mill that is the web?

View on HN

There is a happy middle ground somewhere between "SEO douchebag" and "engineer scornful of effective marketing."

Why should Google pick your review for e.g. Scott Pilgrim over every other review on the Internet? Is it better written? Who will attest to that? Is it from a better brand than Rotten Tomatoes or a more trusted voice than Roger Ebert? Is it better designed? Does it have a voice or perspective that speaks to an audience which Rotten Tomatoes and Ebert tragically ignore? If it does, why aren't people mentioning so?

Go down the line for everything else you do: is this the best cat picture on the Internet? What attests to that? Is this the best Java framework tips on the Internet? What attests to that?

More broadly, is there a market niche for someone who is a bit of a Java programmer, a bit of a film critic, and a bit of a cat photographer, and will it support you against the competition from people who make it their mission in life to do funny cat photos?

Also, is it a good idea to get into these particular niches? LOLcats are are commodity business: any idiot can make them, many do. Reviews are a commodity business unless you are Roger Ebert: I can't name another reviewer in the entire world, and if you randomly pulled sentences from your review and the 15 other reviews of Scott Pilgrim that I read because I have far too much free time, I think it is highly unlikely that I will be able to identify your review. Or anyone else's, except Ebert.

Java programming tips are, potentially, not a commodity business. You could either go StackOverflow (community, comprehensiveness, etc are value adds) or you could go Subject Domain Expert For Japanese Entrance Examination File Formats in Java. But, at the other end of the scale, "opinions about the new Java release from someone who is not Knuth, Gosling, or Alan Turing back from the dead" is a commodity business.

Commodity businesses are bad places to be if you want quality to win out, because minute differentiations in quality are essentially unimportant in commodity businesses. There are many, many IP-based businesses where minute differentiations in quality mean 100x differences in returns. If you like quality, you probably want to be in one of those instead.

"If I wrote it, they will come" is not a marketing strategy.

An elaboration:

Maybe folks have never done this exercise before, and it is instructive and won't step on anyone's toes, so let's go over the rankings for [Scott Pilgrim review] and guess why they rank

#1: Rotten Tomatoes. Megabrand in the movie review space, plenty of content, and they aggregate all the other reviews you could possibly want.

#2: http://www.ugo.com/movies/comic-con-2010-scott-pilgrim-revie... In a just world, this would be probably #1. They have a comic book design for the review. They have better images than most of the reviews, which just recycle the same publicity kit, and they integrate them better. They link to content readers will find quite compelling, such as "Every Video Game Reference in the Scott Pilgrim Comics." A random newspaper reviewer in Kansas isn't chasing that stuff down.

#3: 1UP review of the video game. Three words: "query deserves diversity", which is Google's way of saying "Hey, maybe they actually didn't want a review of Scott Pilgrim the movie. That query was ambiguous. Maybe they meant the videogame instead. In that case, we should surface a few results on the front page so they don't get frustrated." It isn't a particularly compelling review, but it is a less competitive niche and a noted brand.

#4: Internal Google callout for Google News results. This is their sop to a dying industry which has worse problems than you ever will, for similar reasons which are exacerbated by their cost structure. The current best ranked review from Google News is from the University of Dayton's school newspaper. It is as good as one would expect.

#5: Wiki. More pagerank than God. Very, very internally optimized. Content is a poorly written but comprehensive plot summary.

#6 ~ #10: ... you get the idea.

Now, I'm not going to mention your site if you don't want to mention it, but I read your review. Do you have a sense of where a blind oracle with perfect knowledge of content quality would put it in these results? I have an opinion. Be that as it may, can you economically make your review look more like the #2 guys here? If not, why are you competing with them?

I wish I could upvote your indvidual descriptions.

> #5: Wiki. More pagerank than God.

This one would have got most Karma. Wikipedia is an excellent example of self-generating pagerank. More people link to it because anybody can edit it, hence would be "fair" and "comprehensive". And just because a particular Wiki article gets popular, it starts getting more attention (by experts) and hence becomes fair, comprehensive and detailed. The cycle repeats.

#4: Internal Google callout for Google News results. This is their sop to a dying industry

Google is still pretty awful for breaking news and keeping out-of-date content around.

This result is actually more "our results might be aged as we're suddenly seeing more searches than normal".

As dismissive as you might be of traditional media, people want to see their results over 2 year old blogs for current news.

Patrick,

After almost 5 years of doing this and thinking the tide would change "any day now" for the better, I can see now that it will never change... sans bits of income here and there, I will never support my family doing this or create the working environment I've always gunned for, for a few dedicated authors.

That pretty much blows.

Your replies couldn't be more detailed or to the point... or right. I appreciate that... and I might add that you really have a way with words, I agree with the other replies saying you should write this stuff up if you don't already... or give advice to startups or something.

I don't have the time/resources to compete with UGO, Tomatoes or 1UP. And no, I have no idea what it would really take to differentiate myself enough to offer that unique pizzaz to cause someone to bookmark and always come back for their movie reviews (or toilet reviews... or whatever the heck I review that day).

You described it pretty succinctly and to answer the nail in the coffin: "Why are you competing with them?", I was never trying to... I was trying to do something I loved and turn it into a profession.

You know, that crap about "do what you love and the money will follow?" -- but now that I look through your points I realize that I have to face the fact that I am competing with these guys... in as much as I'm trying to make money from this, so I have to get my racing jersey and stand at the starting blocks.

I'm gonna read through the rest of the replies now. For what it's worth your words have helped a random dude on the internet take some time to think about what the hell he wants out of all this.

You can still make money publishing on the Internet. I despair of it for generic commodity content at non spam scales, but half of my SEO buddies are essentially niche publishers. (I probably can't name specific niches, but let's say "Christmas cookies" or "green DIY household projects" or "classic bicycle parts" for rough example of the scale.)

My business is niche publishing if you squint at it: I compete directly with Scholastic Publishing on one very narrow product category, bury them at it, and monetize with ads for a related niche software product.

to bookmark and always come back for their movie reviews (or toilet reviews... or whatever the heck I review that day)

Is your content organized around anything in particular? Only reviews? What's your branding besides you?

Care to share?

It is tagged and categorized fairly richly (via WordPress) and then Guides, Movie and Video Game reviews all called out onto separate pages. Once you are there it is pretty easy to find something you want, but visiting the site every day or reading it's feed does absolutely give you a mish-mash of just about every topic on the planet... it covers my interests, which are all over the map.

Back in the early days it was almost exclusively about tech, HDTV and video games because that is what I was focused on for the first year in my personal life... since then it has widened up quite a bit.

There is even a guide on how to lay laminate wood floors in there because I spent a few weeks doing that with my wife... why wouldn't I want to write that up? It was a lot of work.

It really rubs me the wrong way to think I'm actually being punished by doing that... that had I left those 1-off topics out, I'd have a successful tech site... but as soon as I add that extra content, well then it drags the whole effort down.

Logically, I get it... it makes sense. Another replier pointed out that it kills the grep-ed-ness of the site, not knowing what you are going to get. Makes sense... but there is still this part of my brain that is like "why? why would that HURT it?"

I'm trying to jam my "passion" and my "profession" into the same box and make it all fit, and it's not fitting... and that makes me want to smash the whole box and set it on fire.

Perhaps if you're willing to let other folks look in the box and see what they have, you'll not only get a honest assessment but also some advice on what it holds for you?

I don't think I'm that person. But many folks here are.

Patrick, if your "day job" as a bootstrapped ISV doesn't pan out (not hardly I bet) I think you have a backup career in the wings of doing startup/internet advice blogging. You rock, man. Thank you for all the great comments here on HN.

Thank you, hearing that gives me warm fuzzes.

It is unlikely I will ever blog professionally. Writing feels like work, and promotion like stressful work that I suck at. The pay for blogging is horrendous, and every reason I gave him that is a problem for his business is a problem for me. There are a couple of thousand or tens of thousands of people in the startup space, there are a huge number of bloggers publishing at a prodigious rate, and my odds of being Best In The World for it are pretty low. I mean, we have different beats, but competing against the likes of pg or 37signals on a daily basis does not strike me as a desirable positioning.

Consulting makes a much better choice as a backup career. Clients have huge budgets for provable ROI. (I do most of my work for Italian restaurants, in the metaphorical sense, rather than folks buying bulk ramen.) Enough people trust me these days to fill a pipeline to where I like it. It even might scale if I wanted it to. Thomas can explain that better than I can.

Less stress, less work, better pay, and if I want to continue blogging I can write off the hosting as lead generation on my taxes and get $3 back. What is not to like. Well, working several hours in a row for other people on their schedules, which is why I do software. Still, it makes a good Plan B.

Patrick,

You could probably sell out your own webinars. Like Salman Khan, you break complicated and/or mysterious concepts down well. You're a gifted teacher.

ah! wallflower that is it... I couldn't put my finger on it, but that is what Pat does. Breaking complex topics down into a bunch of edible nuggets with examples and clarifying content.

That is an art.

I am actually good at doing the opposite... I can add fluff and content to complicate a simple topic to the point of tears.

It isn't so much an art and I have not yet figured out how to monetize it. I should probably be a senator ;)

Patrick, you truly are a boon to this community. Good combination of sense/compassion (my reply to this would have been lacking on the compassion front).

The bummer of the SEO world (which I can't decide how Google will solve) is that the "more pagerank than God" sites can churn out mediocrity and immediately rank higher than higher quality stuff. Mashable is more linkworthy just because it's Mashable. They toss out a Scott Pilgrim review and it gets hundreds/thousands of retweets, likes, and links... More than anyone else on the topic. They get the links, not because it's the best review, but because of the SEO foundation they've built and the link-engine they have in place.

SERP placement seems to be self-sustaining-- to assail a trusted site's position, it seems like you need content that is way more than merely better.

SEO is the least of your worries at this point.

You need three things to have a successful blog/platform/whatever.

1) Something worth saying

2) The ability to say it in an intelligible manner

3) The ability to promote it to the right audience

Looking at thebuzzmedia.com, I think you lack 1 - it's not quite clear what you're trying to communicate with your blog, other than an expression of your opinion on a wide range of things. No case is made for why anyone else should care about that. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but no one gives a shit about your opinion about various events. Moreover, the site seems to do a bit of everything rather than focus on a clear topic, which is probably why you don't get many subscribers. People looking for movie reviews won't subscribe to your site because of the geeky articles. People looking for geeky articles won't follow you because they don't want to be spammed with your movie reviews. And neither of those two groups of people will be interested in your cat pictures.

You also appear to have a severe disdain for 3. Well, there, once again, this may sound harsh, but get real, dude. Cases where some undiscovered genius suddenly gets famous through no fault of his own are one in a billion. Almost every success comes with some amount of self-promotion. Post your articles on social news sites. Get feedback. Improve. Connect with the community. Relentlessly put your site out there, on Twitter, on Facebook, everywhere. Post comments on other people's blogs. Submit your articles to Slashdot. Keep at it until you get through. It might take months, or even years. If you don't actively do it, though, it will never happen.

You need to answer the following questions. If you can answer them satisfactorily, your blog readership will increase substantially:

1) Why should anyone care about my blog?

2) Who should care about my blog?

3) Will these people be annoyed by any part of my blog?

4) How am I promoting my blog to get to these people?

5) How am I connecting with these people as human beings rather than just readers?

Good luck!

In case it isn't obvious, a likely result from answering these questions is to split up the site.

I have made good experiences with having a programming blog, a personal blog (which parts of my family and non-geek friends tend to read), and a few sitest that specialize in some very narrow topics (like, Sudoku).

It's OK to cross-link between those sites, as far as there are relations - but don't expect the movie audience to read your Java and Digg stuff.

Yes, absolutely. This is an obvious realisation when you think about point 3, promotion. It's really difficult to promote a site that does a little bit of everything. You can't explain its appeal succinctly and clearly. Once you try to promote your site, it becomes obvious that covering several vastly different topics doesn't work.

FWIW the site used to be 3 separate sites for the first 3.5 years:

* Tech/Video Games site * Humor site * Programming site

and none of them did particularly well on their own. It was also mentally draining for me to try and manage 3 separate communities, so I combined them all.

Probably not the best decision now that I read your replies though.

I think the fist problem is your point of view. Consider your choice of words "SEO-douche bag." and look at the title, you think SEO is bullshit. It's such a hostle point of view. Instead you should embrace seo strategies and find some that you can implement.

Another problem is the "if I build it they will come" idea. The Internet isn't a store front that people are forced to walk by. Without a marketing strategy your site does not exist.

What did you do after you posted an article? Just sit back and pat yourself on the back? Writing the article is half the job, if that. You've got to let people know it exists. Simply having google index it doesn't mean shit.

Michael,

I should have clarified; I don't have a problem with SEO... I always try and choose titles well, keywords, categories and write findable copy. It's the SEO shenanigans that get my blood angry. The info graphics that point back to a bullshit affiliate-laden webpage like onlineeducation.net that actually serves no REAL purpose.

What you said here: ==================== The Internet isn't a store front that people are forced to walk by. Without a marketing strategy your site does not exist. ====================

Is really damn spot on... I write and treat it like it is... like Google or whoever will find the content. I just assumed it would, but I can't compete with the noise level created by other sources blasting links to their own articles on the same topics.

I do submit bigger/more detailed pieces to the social news sites. I got banned from reddit for doing it, then an admin reviewed all my links and unbanned me... that was awesome, really endeared me to that community. Digg I'm auto-buried on for doing it for no reason... again, no spam crap links, just stuff I've been writing.

Slashdot I've been fortunate with about 10 times in the last few years which I'm hugely thankful for... but at the end of the month I don't think it really changed much except for the temporary spikes in traffic.

I believe my biggest problem is I just want to write. I don't want to have to have those marketing problems that the current state of the web is forcing me to have... I'm resistant to it because I'm resentful of it.

It is the whole "get good grades in school and you will be a success!" crap all over again. Then you see the kid that kept failing do 10x better than you and you are so damn mad about focusing on your grades the whole time that your ego won't let you see 10 feet infront of you.

I think that is where I am right now. No ETA yet on when I'll be coming out the other site :)

SEO for most startups isn't about doing all sorts of trickery to rake in tons of traffic, it's about letting people find you easily.

The most important part of the SEO process is keyword research, figuring out what people are searching for. This is the stuff you build and optimize your copy around. Figure out what the most searched phrases are and look at the competition for those results. Why would you use the term 'get a blog' repeatedly in your copy if 'start a blog' had 20x the search volume?

If your site includes embeddable widgets for users you probably give yourself some kind of back link. Why would you waste that link anchor text on just your domain 'ManageProject.ly' instead of a term you want to rank for, like 'Online Project Management'?

If you totally ignore SEO and call it 'bullshittery' then you can't complain when your site doesn't rank well.

Google primarily focuses around a site's authority. You get authority by incoming links from reputable sources, for a startup these would be places like Techcrunch, Mashable, RWW, etc. And it's not a numbers game, it's a quality game.

Your site needs to be authoritative, people need to like what you do and recommend it before good search rankings will even be possible. But when Google's trying to figure out which blogging platform to rank for the term 'start a blog', given two sites with similar authority, they're going to rank the one that is optimized a bit more for that term than the competitor.

I know how you feel - I wrote an 'anything and everything I've ever found interesting' type blog for ten years, and hardly anyone read it (despite a pagerank of 4, and certain individual posts on obscure topics getting decent traffic via Google).

This year I set up a tightly-focussed, single topic blog and committed to writing three posts every week day - it took off, I have lots of enthusiastic readers (and this month I paid the mortgage with a single Amazon affiliate link, if that matters). I did no SEO beyond writing clean, simple HTML, and actively ignored some standard SEO advice (eg. one-word titles, no repetition of keywords).

In other words: in my experience you're never going to become the next Kottke with a general interest weblog, but if you find a niche you're passionate about, you don't need to do any SEO douchebag stuff to attract readers.

1tw,

Could you share a URL to your new site? You paid your mortgage with an Amazon affiliate link... damn!

What kind of traffic are you getting now?

The link's in my profile (not sure what the rules on self-linking are here!)

I get between 45 and 50k page views a month, which isn't exactly crazy traffic - I think the affiliate link in question did well because it was a) part of a very enthusiastic review of a pretty obscure product and b) the post was linked to/reblogged on Tumblr by much more popular sites.

It's certainly made me rethink my plan to put adverts on the site - hard to say without testing, but past experience with Google Ads makes me think the occasional hardware review/affiliate link would be better for me, in terms of earning some cash for all the work I put in, and better for my readers (no intrusive ads, and a good post is a good post whether it has an affiliate link in it or not).

If you believe that your content is better than the content ranking for the words you want to people to find you with, then you engaging in SEO actually improves the quality of the internet. SEO is not an inherently unethical activity, even though many use it to in such a way. Check out SEOmoz's beginner's guide[1] to see how you can actually improve your search rankings by making your site more accessible and improving your content.

[1] http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-op...

The problem in my mind seems to be this:

t's just anything and everything I've ever found interesting written in a slightly more professional manner than "stream of thought" with a small amount of attention paid to titles and internal links only when appropriate and valuable (I HATE how sites like Engadget inner-link every keyword for Google sake).

Blogs that write just about everything NEED to do SEO. People who write very targeted get's traffic without SEO because they will hit a specific interest group which is much more likely to share your stories.

If you have just about everything you are doing 3 things.

1. You are commodifying the value of your content. 2. People won't know what you are all about thus won't relate to you or take you serious. 3. you haven't really written 2000 articles but perhaps a couple of hundred maybe less on each specific subject.

There is nothing wrong with writing just about everything that you find interesting, but if it spans over to broad a spectrum you won't reap the benefits of accumulated linking, thus you will have to increase your SEO to compensate.

Just my two cents.

First, calm down.

Second, realize that the way people find their content online is through search engines like google. Adopt the attitude that by helping google find, index and highly rank your content, you are helping people who search for relevant content discover you and help themselves. Finally, figure out legitimate ways to do this from sites like seomoz.com and others.

Good luck.

I will chip in with my finding of an experiment I did few months back.

* bought a 7 year old domain name.

* wrote 5 pages of content on it.

* then made it live, linked it from a very relevant article on wikipedia.

* Soon got few links.

* The hyper linked text of the incoming link starts to rank within a month.

tl;dr: SEO is just recommendation from other sites. Everything else are micro-details that you can afford to ignore.

Much of SEO is built around authority - eg people referencing your site back on specific topics / subjects.

This is where the human element really comes in, and from your description it sounds like your site's non-specific focus could be the root of the problem: jack of all trades, master of none.

In my experience white-hat SEO is a hard fought battle of link-trading, guest posting, methodically submitting to social media & search, and building an audience around a specific topic.

Beyond that, you've got to embrace the fundamentals - a very solid (free) guide was posted @ SEOMOZ back in June ->

http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-op...

and more specifically:

http://guides.seomoz.org/chapter-7-growing-popularity-and-li...

aresant,

That has been the common theme in everyone's reply and I think you are right with the "jack of all, master of none" comment.

Not sure if what I want is to really drill down on a specific topic though, so now it's an issue of re-evaluating what I want out of all of this with what it will take to be successful and I don't think those two lines intersect unfortunately.

What a friggin waste...

I actually do not see SEO as the be-all and end-all to success. I actually had thought about this same problem myself, though I am not nearly as invested as you are.

It looks like everyone agrees that in order for people to visit, they need to know what to expect. Like when people visit a physical store, the store itself might not be particularly interesting, but the goods it carry is of interest to the visitor at a particular moment. However, people visit more than stores. We visit our friend's homes too, for instance. What do we get out of that?

Why of course it's a relationship. It doesn't really matter what you do together at home. Maybe you do not even offer water to them when they come (bad). They come because they have an interest in you as a person in one way or another.

Blogs are the same. If you depend on search engine traffic then yes, you need to be an authority on some subjects. Do remember, however, that everyone is an authority about him/herself. Does Google Bot care? Maybe not (yet). Do people care? Yes! Why fight with a robot when your goal is to be read by people?

For this reason I think it is not helpful to rely on SEO if you are running a personal blog. Find where people are, like online communities, social networks, and engage with real people. I'm sure you can find a circle that can be your starting point. From there, you may even get feedback that help you gauge just how popular or interesting you truly are, and build your character up so eventually, even Google Bot will love you.

I understand the frustration with most search results today. It is not fair. And in a competitive space few not so good sites outsmart the genuinely good ones. But..

>> My understanding was always that "If I wrote it, they will come".

Its never the case neither on web nor in the offline world. There probably have been many great artists, actors and writers who never saw appreciation from critical mass.

Presenting right and getting others speak high of you is critical for success of a person, a product, a concept or just about anything especially when you are dealing with masses.

Presenting right - the finder should understand - make it right or make believe that you are right, I know the latter is not fair but the end result people see value in what you have. Hence yes you need to take care of things they understand, the title, keywords in text, alt on images etc

Getting others to speak of you - works as a fairly good starting point to evaluate anything new. As one understands better can always correct. Links, context & authority define this on web. As in the offline world either you proactively get people to vouch or the quality is exceptional that people talk about it.

Sadly post the initial assessment based on reference, a later correction based on content is very hard due to the limitation of technology - it can take months to years to conclude your site is a blog talking about wooden furniture (say) and you can be trusted not to be something else overnight.

Its good to question the status quo but if you aren't building a better widely adopted search engine, its better to be found by the current one.

Edit: format, removed unnecessary quote.

Google _loves_ sites that are tightly focused on a specific niche that update frequently containing well written text.

I found this out by accident when Newsley's page dedicated to articles from preview.bloomberg.com[1] (Bloomberg's new look and feel beta ) started getting a bunch of organic search traffic. Turns out, I'm on the front page of Google's results for that search term [2].

By rights, I have no reason to be on that front page. There's 9 Million other results in Google's index for that search term, and my site soft launched last November.

My SEO for that page was a complete fluke. Newsley started out as a social news site, and I simply created a page for articles from a particular source. Google really liked the page, and apparently there weren't too many other sites like that. So, I'm on the front page.

I'm leaving social news behind, and turning Newsley into a search engine for economic and social news. But, even though I'm neck deep in writing the Newsley_bot, a bunch of web scrapers and learning out how to build a real time index of financial news, I'm releasing individual results pages as I have them. I also created a tagging system so the Google_bot has a way to reach those pages as well as I included those pages in my site map.

Since I started doing those things 3 weeks ago, the number of pages from Newsley.com in Google's index has gone from 200 to 17,000, my organic traffic has gone from 3-4 hits a day to 80 hits a day, and My total traffic has more than tripled in the last week. I'm also hitting the first two pages of Google results for 40 long tail search terms, including "What's Popular" [3].

All that really means to me, however is that when I release basic search functionality in a month or two, I should have a decent stream of traffic to use the search features, so I can work on improving it.

Whether it's SEO bullshittery or not, this is how Google (and consequently most of the interweb) works. And, like it or not, that's what you have to do if you're going to get organic search traffic: have to have a page or site tightly focused on a specific topic, with decent text that updates frequently. Well crafted urls, titles and meta tags also help a lot too.

ref: [1] http://newsley.com/by_source/preview.bloomberg.com/ [2] http://www.google.com/search?q=preview.bloomberg.com [3] http://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+popular&hl=en... [4] clickable: http://Newsley.com

Since you've gotten us all reading this, how about a link to your site?

I'm guessing it's thebuzzmedia.com

For what it's worth, it seems to be a fairly decent site

yes that is it... used to be breakitdownblog.com

Thanks for the kind words.

Think about it in the context of if your business was an offline shop.

Think about the SEO / Organic search as being how busy the highstreet is that your shop resides.

Then think about the amount of transport links (roads / trains / airports) that are nearby being the incoming links.

Finally, think about the competition for the keywords on search, as being similar shops on the high street.

Currently you may have a great shop with lots to offer, but it's stuck out in the middle of no where, with no transport links and hardly any passing traffic. What's worse, is that you have many shops just like yours in the area and no unique selling point. You wouldn't expect that shop to thrive.

The technique many use these days, is to work on the keywords / SEO from the start - placing their shop in a busy place with existing traffic passing through. Looking for a niche which doesn't have too much competition. Then they contact similar blogs / media providers and try to get as many links as possible coming in.

They now have the traffic, they just need to provide a good service and convert it to revenue somehow.

'SEO bullshitery' - is the wrong way to think of it. Along with 'SEO' being black art or magic. Ok, there are people out there that are 'gaming' the system, but it doesn't change the fact that for a web product SEO / market competition online for the niche is an extremely important thing to consider.

This article is dear and near to my heart. I've spent the last 3 years working on solving the issue of the SEO crap chute.

The problem with SEO is that it requires content and links. Content should be the only metric. Unfortunately then we'd have no way to distinguish crap from gold. So links are needed as a popularity gauge. Unfortunately links have become a currency more important than content.

If we somehow had the ability to build our own community of bloggers? People from our blog roll, or colleagues we write with, like building relationships on Twitter. Then we could take the focus of links and put it back on content.

We'll thats now possible, like I said, I've spent the last 3 years working on this. The answer to your SEO problems is something called Arkayne. Here is what you can do with it:

Arkayne: http://www.arkayne.com/arkayne

1. Register, create your profile. 2. Create your own community of fellow bloggers. 3. Outrank any of the SEO Gods in days. 4. Live life as a happy blogger writing good content.

Absolutely leave me and my team a comment, now that we can, shifting this game is fun.

I think it's a balance. The content generation mills focus on generating keyword dense, SEO friendly articles at the expense of quality. It sounds like you have generated vast amounts of quality content at the expense of any sort of marketing. Keep in mind that 2000 articles is nearly 6 posts a day for an entire year. If I assume each article took roughly 20 minutes to write, that is 666 hours or writing (coincidence I swear!). Again, to balance that writing time out, let's say you devote a mere 2% of that writing time to marketing. That would come to about 13 hours. A 98/2 split seems fair enough to me, and I would imagine that 13 hours spent marketing your writings would result in significant and sustained traffic increases. If you feel that white-hat SEO isn't your thing (which I think is highly inadvisable), just spend that time sending emails or reaching out to friends. If you write it, and you don't market it, they won't come.

You're probably suffering from an extreme lack of inbound links, not outbound links. The web is a popularity contest and you're seen by Google as the guy over in the corner talking to himself. Inbound links are like saying, "Hey, look at this guy, he's great.".

You can do a simple inbound link check in google like this:

http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=yoururlhere.com&btnG=...

Are there any results? Probably not many. Now try the same thing with ycombinator.com. Inbound links are 80% of the battle as far as I can tell.

Using "link" on Google's search shows something like 38 and Yahoo Website Explorer shows like 7... but going from Google's Webmaster Tools shows 2.9 million http://imgur.com/cTaKE.png

I have no idea what is up with that discrepancy...

Put each niche in its own subdomain. The main domain aggregates the subdomains. Never post on the main domain first, only the subdomains.

Also, try to get some active commenting. Google loves to see users engaged on a blog page.

You do have a 4 year old domain, so that should lend some authority to your site.

But, yeah, I agree with you. Google has rewarded and incentivized the dilution of information.

Many of your blog posts could be split up into multiple parts. To a visitor, that experience sucks, but to Google, it looks like you have so much more content, because it has it's own page.

If you want traffic from Google, you have to play the game.

I am amazed at how google has created a virtuous incentive cycle in which experts are competing with each other to give away the best information and gather the most interest.

Compare that to television, radio or print advertising, do you get the impression anyone is competing to provide the most useful information ?

Lying and misleading people is wrong, but that doesn't seem to be a huge part of most SEO activity.

The most common activity I see is people saying "hmm what can I put out there that other people will be interested in", that's an absolutely amazingly positive result.

My 2 cents.

I'm not sure that Google or the SEO motivation is the driver. The web prior to Google and prior to most monetization also had experts competing to put as much free stuff online as they could, and to let people know about it, with the main motivation being either people who had things they wanted to say, or some variety of social prestige. There's more total information these days, of course, but I think the proportion that's legitimate (versus content-farm) is also lower.

I am amazed at how google has created a virtuous incentive cycle in which experts are competing with each other to give away the best information and gather the most interest.

Seems to me that it's more like a vicious cycle in which people compete to stuff pages full of the right keywords at the expense of content.

Some people suggest that with their adsense product, they encourage you to write pages that look like what people want, that turn up high on a query, something good enough that people don't immediately hit 'back' but that don't answer the question. If you answer the user's question, they are much less likely to click on your adsense ads.

Now, sometimes it kinda works okay; I know one guy who writes a fair bit of technical documentation; documentation that he promotes the hell out of, and that gives him fairly high pagerank. The problem is, programmers don't click ads. So what did the guy do? he threw in some pages about 'free MP3 downloads' with some free mp3s on there... of legal, free music that nobody wants, of course, but he makes orders of magnitude more money from the ads on that page, that page that ranks highly (because it's on a high pagerank site, and because it's got all the keywords) but that has no content that anyone actually wants.

I mean, personally, I don't have a problem with making money misdirecting people who search for "free MP3s" - but it does make google objectively worse.

It's important to know that as developers, there's a lot we should be doing to ensure that Google crawls and indexes our web pages properly:

http://www.slideshare.net/luigimontanez/searchfriendly-web-d...

No it is not the only way to succeed. I launched a site 1 year ago for a medical publisher. They received 1st page ranking for about 800 of 3500 pages. Got about 3000 visits a month. It is not a huge number - but in this niche it was very good. And we did it only with SEO. No SEM.

I've always wondered if there is a directory where Hacker News' finest could share their blogs with each other.

I wouldn't mind following the blogs of quite a few of you guys as you seem well-educated on a multitude of issues (and I hope at least a couple of you feel that way towards me!).

The guidelines say: If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

A lot of HN users have used the "About" field in the profile to link to their websites.

This has been discussed before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1442056

This was more of the discussion I was looking to have. Thanks! Will check it out and read through everyone else's thoughts.

be so good they can't ignore you. be so good people naturally tell others about you. rinse, repeat.

What kind of traffic does your site get rkalla? Amazing to me that you could have 2000 posts over 4 years and not be doing 'well'. Does "make it" for you mean Internet celebrity/millionaire or simply pay-your-bills and a little extra money?

Jose,

Right now the site does about 500-600k pageviews a month and I make just enough from Adsense to cover hosting costs... that's it.

"make it" would be enough income to support family with some extra to take trips occasionally.

"super make it" would be enough to do that and pay 3 or 4 authors that love their job to write. That was always my goal and it just hasn't happened.

Okay. "Everything from fixing your MTU settings on your Q1000 modem to Java framework tips I find handy to years worth of game and movies reviews to hilarious cat pictures."

Two words: brand consistency.

People like to know what to expect. You aren't giving them that. Instead, you're offering an undifferentiated mishmash, not unlike a KFC Bowl. Only less edible.

SEO is not your problem. No matter how good your individual articles are, you have failed at a core part of product-making.

"If you build it, they will come" has always been wrong. If, in addition to having a fragmented and un-classifiable product, you aren't out there busting your hump trying to guest post, make connections, and whatnot, you're still gonna fail.

If you want to succeed, look at all the genuinely successful sites. They all have a thread of personality, a pattern, a rhythm, and a predictable-ness -- that doesn't mean boring, it means they are graspable.

ahoyhere,

Of course I agree with you, seeing things written out from a 3rd party perspective.

I argue frequently with people about how the #1 thing resturaunts can suffer from is lack of consistency. When you walk in that door, you want to know exactly what your $10 is going to get you, yet I'm violating the sin out of that.

Yet when it comes to my own tunnel-visioned quest for success, I missed the goddamn boat by a mile.

I think this could also be a bad case of ego... suffering from the assumption that I thought I was so interesting people would inherently want to listen to absolutely everything I had to say.

This post has been a lot like getting kicked in the ego-nuts, but it will be for the better.

I appreciate the truthful reply... now just to figure out if I want to even keep doing this or not.

I applaud you for taking it so well! Most people given advice like that tend to argue why they should do it their way, even though all evidence points to the contrary. Even if you decide to not keep going on this blog, you'll remember that you need to apply the consistency thing to yourself for everything you do from now on :)

Good luck!

(And, if it makes you feel better, I recently had the same epiphany about my own writing projects. I figured it out by assessing what the blogs I love did, and realizing I did almost none of those things.)

The problem is that so many people understood the basic ideas about micro-niches and about placing appropriate keywords where it is possible or not - domain names, uris, tirles, headers, internal links, div names - every element you could imagine.

There are very strong competition in, say, tour agencies in a small region. Type Sikkim, or Ladakh or Nepal - hundreds of sites with almost the same content - buy our tours. And of course, first 3 got a shitload of money, while rest got nothing.

SEO is just a part of the rules of the game, and it is really big. Micro-niches, like putting misspelled keywords (no one knows how to write Kanchenjunga or Unawatuna) helps a little.

So, just accept that SEO became mainstream thing and 8 of 10 trying to take advantage of it, with the almost the same crappy content. Content of a really good quality is really costly, especially periodic one.

why is it the "seo-douchebag"'s fault that Google decides to rank crap on the front page? Shouldn't that be Google's fault?

If you want to leverage the high volume of traffic Google can provide, you must at least try and pay attention to SEO tactics in order to popup anywhere near the top. Writing good content and praying doesn't work nearly as much as people say it does.

Not defending the content mills (I do think they're a pain too), but one thing is for sure: they know how the system works, are not afraid to game it, and are successful at it. Play their game for a little, and maybe you'll discover less repugnant ways to use SEO to your own advantage.

To win big, you can't be afraid to play a a little dirty.

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