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Are you building something like Yelp, Mahalo and Stack Overflow or something like Gmail and Basecamp. If you have a site full of content - then you should be d
by whatusername 17y ago
Are you building something like Yelp, Mahalo and Stack Overflow or something like Gmail and Basecamp.
If you have a site full of content - then you should be designing around SEO. Spolsky's thought that the front page of SO is Google.com is very true. Discoverable content is useful content.
If you have a Private web-app (think gmail) then Search Results aren't all that important.
- dualogy 17y agoHowever, there might be classes of web apps where Search Results can help attract new users, albeit maybe not at scale.
- _delirium 17y agoWell, much of this week's HN discussion, to my satisfaction at least, held up Mahalo as an example of what you don't want to do. ;-) To my mind, building a returning base of satisfied users ought to be the main goal: what is missing on the internet, and how can I provide it? That is, what's missing for actual users? The other approach seems to teeter on the edge of the gray-hat SEO abyss.
- axod 17y agoI agree completely. Sites like Mahalo and Scribd are just wrapping up content and duping people into clicking through SEO to their site, and then clicking on adSense adverts to get what they really wanted in the first place. There's a reverse incentive at work there - they have no incentive to provide a better user experience, since then, users would get what they want, and wouldn't need to click on the ads. Google could, and definitely should IMHO detect that user behaviour, and penalize sites for it. For example: * If a user clicks on a natural search listing * If that same user quickly clicks on an adSense advert at the site * We can assume that the landing page was bad quality * Now penalize them either by not paying the adsense, or reduce their ranking for that page. If you have a valuable site, Google should only be there to provide you new users, not all your users. I think the quote about Google being the frontpage to stackoverflow is pretty ridiculous personally.
- qeorge 17y ago"I think the quote about Google being the frontpage to stackoverflow is pretty ridiculous personally." Why? Because its true? There's a lot of content sites I use all the time but never visit directly. Yahoo Answers comes to mind.
- axod 17y agoI just don't think it's a useful state of affairs once a site has tens, even hundreds of millions of pages indexed by google. Why wouldn't you go to Yahoo answers and do a search there? I'm just not too into the business model of "We know about everything", lets get listed for every single search on google. For stackoverflow, personally I don't usually find the content useful, so it's just irritating to have to specify I don't want stackoverflow results. It'd be good if Google could better judge quality of pages, as in "Is this just user generated / scraped content, or is it verified reliable fact".
- ericd 17y agoYou don't go to Yahoo answers directly because you can either search one, or search them all at once. Do you still go to the bakery, then the butcher, then the vegetable stand, or do you go to a supermarket? As for judging quality and verifying as a reliable fact, I agree, that would be excellent. This is something I was thinking about as part of a potential startup. Unfortunately, it's wicked hard to do without resorting to (probably paid) human experts.
- axod 17y ago>> "Do you still go to the bakery, then the butcher, then the vegetable stand, or do you go to a supermarket?" I often still go to the bakery, then the butcher, then the farm shop actually. The quality is far better than anything you get in a supermarket.
- ericd 17y agoHeh actually I wish I had all of those things located nearby, I've never been disappointed when I've spent the time to go to all of those.