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I'm not sure how much of it is that google tries to reduce the effects of SEO, or that they just keep moving the target. Every time they change their algorithm

I'm not sure how much of it is that google tries to reduce the effects of SEO, or that they just keep moving the target. Every time they change their algorithm it seems like a bunch of sites who were practicing one strategy disappear, and before long a new strategy is discovered causing new sites to rise to the top. Ultimately Google's ability to quantify both quality and relevance will converge on actual quality and relevance. In other words, the way to "game" the system and practice SEO will be to create a site that is actually relevant with high-quality content. But we're not there yet, and who knows how close we'll actually get.

snewman 11y ago
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
brosirmandude 11y ago
This is definitely what is happening. I work in SEO and follow the industry closely, but the SEO industry itself is a giant echo-chamber. But essentially what it boils down to is: - make something your audience wants - make content your audience wants to share - "earn" links by creating useful resources & content Essentially, the way to get great rankings in Google is by actually having a website that people want to go to and is relevant to their interests. Trying to game the system is much harder these days, and honestly for the most part isn't worth the effort.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  This is what SEO firms like to say because it gives them cover and makes people think they're just content writers, but I don't think it's accurate. Backlinks are still king, even if your site has scarcely any content on it; not that it's bad to have more high-quality content, but it's not like Google weighs that strongly. A lot more human curation would be needed to determine that. You put "earn" in quotation marks, because these aren't organically earned except in a tiny fraction of cases. Most of them are planted.
- gardano 11y ago
  As somebody with no dog in this fight, I cannot help but wonder if there's a correlation between PageRank and the rise of referring to text on a page as "Content", rather than, well, "An Article".
  - kolinko 11y ago
    Content is just a generic term. If you write a post or a Slideshare that has mostly pictures in it, it's still content but not an article.
    - the_af 11y ago
      Not sure if the parent poster referred to this, but it's not absurd to consider that the term "content" may have harmful connotations. See Stallman's opinion on this (I know, an extremist view, but I think he has a point): "Words to avoid (or use with care)": http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Content http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Content > If you want to describe a feeling of comfort and satisfaction, by all means say you are “content,” but using the word as a noun to describe publications and works of authorship adopts an attitude you might rather avoid: it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages the works themselves. If you don't agree with that attitude, you can call them “works” or “publications.” I think there may be a correlation between this negative phenomenon of gaming pagerank and referring to articles and pictures as "content", as if they were second-class citizens of the web.
    - gardano 11y ago
      I guess my reaction is such that the term "Content" relegates an article (or a slide deck) to being a unit of commerce, rather than a summary of thought (or of emotion).
  - smitherfield 11y ago
    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=content%2Carticle&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccontent%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Carticle%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=content%2Carti...
- vehementi 11y ago
  Well a bad part of it is that "something your audience wants" has proven to be "awful buzzfeed clickbait titles", so human shittiness trumps value in this way
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    But how much traffic do clickbait titles get from search? I would guess almost none. Clickbait titles are an optimization for social media and "content discovery" ad platforms like Outbrain or Taboola, not search.
  - cubano 11y ago
    As history has proven it almost always does.
  - Trundle 11y ago
    You may just be working with a poor definition of value if you consider giving people what they want to be at odds with it.
    - Houshalter 11y ago
      "Value" is not equal to "what people click on". That's just what's easy to measure. The more you optimize the second goal, the more it will diverge from what people actually value.
    - vehementi 11y ago
      Is heroin a very high value product?
      - unchocked 11y ago
        Absolutely, judging from what people are willing to pay. Arguments against heroin are invariably rooted in negative externalities. I have never heard anyone argue that there is no demand for heroin.
        11y ago
- prawn 11y ago
  One thing I seriously dislike about SEO is the value placed in content often above actual practice. So if a client is a plumber, we're realistically telling them to start an e-zine of engaging, shareable content rather than just providing a great service. Or pushing backlinks. When so much business is decided by a search engine, the plumbing company with people writing "10 crazy plumbing stories you won't believe" beats the plumbers who are out on call each day. Further, if time-on-page is a Google factor, the site with a slideshow or listicle is going to top the one with efficient info and contact details.
  - zo1 11y ago
    The alternative for your hypothetical plumber to get "on Google" is to buy advertising from them. So instead of gaming SEO, or creating e-zine content that's shareable on the "social" sites, he has to buy ad space from Google so that his site shows up on searches. Side note. Ideally, your plumber's service shouldn't have to be "googled". It should be in some sort of directory, and we shouldn't be using Google for that. The problem is that people are so very reliant on Google to find everything for them that they don't know any other place to do it. And no reasonable competitor (that I know of) has come in to provide such a directory service. Most "yellow-page" sites I've seen are giant data-dumps of next-to-useless and out-dated pieces of information. No wonder people "google it". Minor anecdote. Just the other day, I searched for a known name of a website/company (can't remember). And the first hit was their website, but just above it was an Adword ad for them. Not thinking, I accidentally clicked the adword version. That was $1 right there taken from their advertising budget because of a broken web (I'd argue), and simply given to Google.
    - seanp2k2 11y ago
      Yep, I've done that before on browsers without any ad blockers. I'm so used to clicking the first result that looks like what I want that I got bit by an ad. I'll always go out of my way to click the not-ad link if it goes to the place I want.
cardine 11y ago
I think that by the time that Google is able to quantify quality and relevance, people will be able to use AI to automatically create websites that are relevant and high quality. I'm not sure whether that is a good thing or not, but it would make sense that the sophistication of the AI used to game Google moves at about the same pace of Google's ability to stop people from gaming its algorithms.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I suspect it's not that hard to get a very rough assessment of quality and relevance - although it would only be useful with a giant multidimensional model of demographics and interests, because "relevant" isn't a scalar. My guess is Google doesn't do it because it costs too many cycles. Counting backlinks, supplemented by some very basic NLP, is very much cheaper and easier. The irony is that I wonder if people would pay for - or at least not mind - guided and prompted personal search if it produced highly relevant results. The sad truth is that the current sneaky lumping of broad demographic guessing with search history with backlink counting and a bit of NLP/timeline voodoo produces mediocre results for many kinds of searches. (I've just spent a very frustrating 15 minutes trying to find out if the raw datasets from KIC 8462852 are available online. Usually my search fu is pretty good, but I couldn't get a definitive answer.) I'm not sure to what extent Google's sales model relies on this. It's much easier to sell advertising if you don't offer an SLA, because it becomes the customer's fault if the service doesn't provide high quality results. A more effective service would increase ad buyer confidence and the price of niche ad sales would increase, but maybe not by enough to compensate for the loss of more generic ad sales overall.
scriptproof 11y ago
There is no scientific definition of quality, so this can't happens (even if there is a easy ascertainment of garbage). Google is used to confuse quality and popularity, so maybe we will end with the more popular texts, ideas, beliefs, etc. on the top.
chei0aiV 11y ago
People will still be able to game that scenario, just copy-paste from elsewhere.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

snewman 11y ago

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

brosirmandude 11y ago

This is definitely what is happening. I work in SEO and follow the industry closely, but the SEO industry itself is a giant echo-chamber. But essentially what it boils down to is: - make something your audience wants - make content your audience wants to share - "earn" links by creating useful resources & content Essentially, the way to get great rankings in Google is by actually having a website that people want to go to and is relevant to their interests. Trying to game the system is much harder these days, and honestly for the most part isn't worth the effort.

cookiecaper 11y ago
This is what SEO firms like to say because it gives them cover and makes people think they're just content writers, but I don't think it's accurate. Backlinks are still king, even if your site has scarcely any content on it; not that it's bad to have more high-quality content, but it's not like Google weighs that strongly. A lot more human curation would be needed to determine that. You put "earn" in quotation marks, because these aren't organically earned except in a tiny fraction of cases. Most of them are planted.
gardano 11y ago
As somebody with no dog in this fight, I cannot help but wonder if there's a correlation between PageRank and the rise of referring to text on a page as "Content", rather than, well, "An Article".
- kolinko 11y ago
  Content is just a generic term. If you write a post or a Slideshare that has mostly pictures in it, it's still content but not an article.
  - the_af 11y ago
    Not sure if the parent poster referred to this, but it's not absurd to consider that the term "content" may have harmful connotations. See Stallman's opinion on this (I know, an extremist view, but I think he has a point): "Words to avoid (or use with care)": http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Content http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Content > If you want to describe a feeling of comfort and satisfaction, by all means say you are “content,” but using the word as a noun to describe publications and works of authorship adopts an attitude you might rather avoid: it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages the works themselves. If you don't agree with that attitude, you can call them “works” or “publications.” I think there may be a correlation between this negative phenomenon of gaming pagerank and referring to articles and pictures as "content", as if they were second-class citizens of the web.
  - gardano 11y ago
    I guess my reaction is such that the term "Content" relegates an article (or a slide deck) to being a unit of commerce, rather than a summary of thought (or of emotion).
- smitherfield 11y ago
  https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=content%2Carticle&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccontent%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Carticle%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=content%2Carti...
vehementi 11y ago
Well a bad part of it is that "something your audience wants" has proven to be "awful buzzfeed clickbait titles", so human shittiness trumps value in this way
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  But how much traffic do clickbait titles get from search? I would guess almost none. Clickbait titles are an optimization for social media and "content discovery" ad platforms like Outbrain or Taboola, not search.
- cubano 11y ago
  As history has proven it almost always does.
- Trundle 11y ago
  You may just be working with a poor definition of value if you consider giving people what they want to be at odds with it.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    "Value" is not equal to "what people click on". That's just what's easy to measure. The more you optimize the second goal, the more it will diverge from what people actually value.
  - vehementi 11y ago
    Is heroin a very high value product?
    - unchocked 11y ago
      Absolutely, judging from what people are willing to pay. Arguments against heroin are invariably rooted in negative externalities. I have never heard anyone argue that there is no demand for heroin.
      - 11y ago
prawn 11y ago
One thing I seriously dislike about SEO is the value placed in content often above actual practice. So if a client is a plumber, we're realistically telling them to start an e-zine of engaging, shareable content rather than just providing a great service. Or pushing backlinks. When so much business is decided by a search engine, the plumbing company with people writing "10 crazy plumbing stories you won't believe" beats the plumbers who are out on call each day. Further, if time-on-page is a Google factor, the site with a slideshow or listicle is going to top the one with efficient info and contact details.
- zo1 11y ago
  The alternative for your hypothetical plumber to get "on Google" is to buy advertising from them. So instead of gaming SEO, or creating e-zine content that's shareable on the "social" sites, he has to buy ad space from Google so that his site shows up on searches. Side note. Ideally, your plumber's service shouldn't have to be "googled". It should be in some sort of directory, and we shouldn't be using Google for that. The problem is that people are so very reliant on Google to find everything for them that they don't know any other place to do it. And no reasonable competitor (that I know of) has come in to provide such a directory service. Most "yellow-page" sites I've seen are giant data-dumps of next-to-useless and out-dated pieces of information. No wonder people "google it". Minor anecdote. Just the other day, I searched for a known name of a website/company (can't remember). And the first hit was their website, but just above it was an Adword ad for them. Not thinking, I accidentally clicked the adword version. That was $1 right there taken from their advertising budget because of a broken web (I'd argue), and simply given to Google.
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    Yep, I've done that before on browsers without any ad blockers. I'm so used to clicking the first result that looks like what I want that I got bit by an ad. I'll always go out of my way to click the not-ad link if it goes to the place I want.

cardine 11y ago

I think that by the time that Google is able to quantify quality and relevance, people will be able to use AI to automatically create websites that are relevant and high quality. I'm not sure whether that is a good thing or not, but it would make sense that the sophistication of the AI used to game Google moves at about the same pace of Google's ability to stop people from gaming its algorithms.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I suspect it's not that hard to get a very rough assessment of quality and relevance - although it would only be useful with a giant multidimensional model of demographics and interests, because "relevant" isn't a scalar. My guess is Google doesn't do it because it costs too many cycles. Counting backlinks, supplemented by some very basic NLP, is very much cheaper and easier. The irony is that I wonder if people would pay for - or at least not mind - guided and prompted personal search if it produced highly relevant results. The sad truth is that the current sneaky lumping of broad demographic guessing with search history with backlink counting and a bit of NLP/timeline voodoo produces mediocre results for many kinds of searches. (I've just spent a very frustrating 15 minutes trying to find out if the raw datasets from KIC 8462852 are available online. Usually my search fu is pretty good, but I couldn't get a definitive answer.) I'm not sure to what extent Google's sales model relies on this. It's much easier to sell advertising if you don't offer an SLA, because it becomes the customer's fault if the service doesn't provide high quality results. A more effective service would increase ad buyer confidence and the price of niche ad sales would increase, but maybe not by enough to compensate for the loss of more generic ad sales overall.

scriptproof 11y ago

There is no scientific definition of quality, so this can't happens (even if there is a easy ascertainment of garbage). Google is used to confuse quality and popularity, so maybe we will end with the more popular texts, ideas, beliefs, etc. on the top.

chei0aiV 11y ago

People will still be able to game that scenario, just copy-paste from elsewhere.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]