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Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

You're wrong. SEO will get you the visits, but Google monitors time on your site, clicks to related search results, bounces, and returns to the search results page. They use crafty machine-learning.

If you get a bunch of in-links, but your content doesn't perform (or worse performs in a spammy way), you're visits are going to tank. As I understand it, PageRank nowadays basically controls in what order Google will crawl your pages, and has some effect on your SERPs. But the algorithms are far from dependent on PageRank/popularity.

Content matters.

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Experts Exchange is a favorite whipping boy here lately (and with great reason). I bring it up because if Google put as much weight on the UX measurements as you claim, SERPs would be bereft of Experts Exchange links. Most of us here know you can see the answers by scrolling to the bottom, but even a lot of professional devs I know hit the back button when they see the "join now" links, let alone the novices and hobbyists.

A few friends of mine in the eCommerce business hit top 3 rankings on semi-competitive keyphrases by doing nothing to their sites but building rich internal link structures.

One of them sold ipod covers, for example. Product descriptions, marketing text, etc, all read "[iPod covers], also called [iPod Jackets] are [covers for the iPod]" etc etc etc. And each of those phrases link back to the Index.

After they did this-- creating thousands of links leading back to the index-- they went from google obscurity to top of the rankings. And they've held that spot for a long time.

And this massive amount of text with every 3rd word a link back to the index is not good content. It's horrible, actually. And there's a LOT of it.

And that's not blackhat. That's 100% legit SEO!

You misunderstood. I am NOT saying that content does not matter. I am NOT saying to game the system just for hits. Geesh. I love writing, and I write the best content I can.

I am saying that marketing is and has always been 90% and content 10%. That's true for blogging, for programming, for anything where you're trying to have an impact on people.

And it's not you, but I'm really tired of all the hand-waving and magic Google talk. I'm sure they have special powers that lets them see at night too, but they don't have the power to change reality. If you measure something and reward people based on it, people will game the system to increase the measure. No matter how complicated your magic system is.

This is a fairly silly gripe. There is no objective measure for "best," content. Google has done a great job of finding relevant results for a given topic, and as the previous poster pointed out, they are constantly making adjustments to prevent "gaming," of the system as you describe it.

Beyond that, marketing is nothing more than swaying people's opinions. If you engage in marketing, and convince people you have the best content, and Google picks up on that and increases the page rank accordingly, I'd say they are doing exactly what they advertise.

Marketing may be important, but content is way more than 10%. How many sites have you ever visited? How many do you return to frequently, and tell others about?

Now, what makes the difference, marketing, or your experience at that site?

This guy has famously boasted that his page was ranked higher than those of companies with billion-dollar advertising budgets, without him ever promoting it. Why? Because it was funny. And that's all it took. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maddox_(writer)

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