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Comment by patrickstox | Hacker News Reader

Folks here have a really strange view of SEO.

These days it's really following guidelines, creating content that people want to see and is useful to searchers, linking to sources, etc.

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The massive amount of github/stackoverflow content clones sitting at the top of the results for programming related queries seem to disagree with this sentiment. Ok I guess they are "creating content people want to see", but if just copypasting everyting from another source is enough for that...

Also the large amount of bots creating fake accounts on forums (my experience is with Discourse) with profiles and spam posts to SEO boost some site indicate a whole shady background business going here.

Yeah, reminds me of anecdotes from the Dan Lyons book [0] about Hubspot. There was the shiny fun stuff happening "front of house", but back in the boiler-room it was ugly. And everyone gets shown only what they need to see to make them feel happy/sign/pay, and nothing else.

No-one actually wants to know how the sausage is made.

[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26030703-disrupted

It really depends on who you ask. The most "successful" companies don't whitehat their way there. Just open any modern social media website and tell me if they are respectful of the users — and you can see that part. SEO is mostly invisible so they really don't have to care about you.

Content that people want to see ... plastered with affiliate links and/or biased to sell those people what you want them to buy. This is about extracting value and that value has to come from somewhere. Searchers are not benefiting here, they are the ones ultimately paying for it.

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