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What's the guide to 2017 SEO? As far as I can tell, it involves a) begging for links; b) buying links; c) gradually building your own private link ring of "cont

What's the guide to 2017 SEO? As far as I can tell, it involves a) begging for links; b) buying links; c) gradually building your own private link ring of "content sites" so that you don't have to do a and b so much. Outside of SEO, now popular is also fake social media profiles. What's the guidebook there to "Social Media Optimization" (I'm sure there's a real acronym for that by now), and how are Facebook/Twitter policing their datasets to prevent spam and fraud? afaict they're not, beyond basic anti-scraping methods like blocking anonymous proxies, etc. Not trying to be aggressive, just really don't think that there is any reasonable way to do organic internet marketing anymore. It all boils down to either spam or advertisements. Spam (used broadly here to include astroturfing, PBNs, etc.) is the more effective solution by far, which means if you don't do it, you'll lose to the competitor who will. I've come across SEO guys who insist they have the secrets to modern SEO, but on further inspection, they're just referring to using all of their clients' sites to link back to each other and insisting that they're the only ones who know how to do this. It is true that an SEO firm's rate may be worthwhile if it buys you access to a well-governed link ring, but personally I'm skeptical of the abilities of anyone who has chosen to be involved in that type of career path. It's usually sales types who think they're good at computers, i.e., people who don't really have any idea what they're doing beyond convincing someone to pay them money.

paulcole 10y ago
>I've come across SEO guys who insist they have the secrets to modern SEO If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him. My experience is that there's 3 things that work: 1. Write a lot. No matter how much research you do, you can't predict what will rank. You can increase the odds, but there are no guarantees. In the context of a software company (one of my previous jobs) do customer support and post in-depth answers to support questions. Write about users' success stories. Write about product features that might be hard to understand. Write about industry issues. Eventually you'll start to get some results. It's not an overnight thing. 2. Keep writing. If you think you're writing enough, you probably aren't. 3. Build relationships in you domain. Contact other companies serving the same audience who aren't your competitors. Post on message boards and Facebook groups without ever selling anything. Give away the most valuable thing you have: expert knowledge. People will read what you write and share/link to it. I know it's much easier to just write the whole thing off as scams and hucksters, but good writing is what it's all about today. I'll add a big caveat that there are MANY industries I don't know the landscape of. In the past, I've written in-house for largeish ecom and saas companies. Currently I work for an agency on a variety of clients, mostly smaller local businesses.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  So if you throw enough at the shit at the wall, eventually something will stick, in the sense that someone will link to it. That hardly seems like a viable or repeatable "strategy" for increasing search rank. My personal experience with this, after paying for months of professional content writing, is that you get a few people posting links on their zero-PageRank Wordpress blogs and you get a few people attempting to share links or spread the word, but over-aggressive forum admins have filters that automatically remove all off-domain hyperlinks, and, in some cases, openly-hostile admins will remove any link to or mention of anything that isn't their own site. One of the largest forums in our niche had this policy; if you didn't pay them $5k for an ad package, any mention of your site whatsoever would be removed. You also get competitors, often large ones, blatantly ripping/reskinning your content without giving any credit, and then everyone shares the link from the better-known source instead. Google claims that good content is key, but what they mean is that "good content will get links, so links mean content is good, so we just count links". The premise that links correlate with quality is no longer valid in 2017. People no longer puts links on the internet to content they like, at least not in the format that Google expects and/or is able to access. The simple fact is that Google is made for the web past, and that it doesn't work on the web as it stands. Our competitor had only 2-3 publicly visible pages that informed on the mechanics of their service and provided 0 related content. We had a blog that featured new posts with updates that were relevant to the niche almost-daily, including fully original high-quality photo essays with abundant explanatory text. Despite this, with a little bit of spam voodoo, they blew us away on SEO in every non-long-tail keyword.

paulcole 10y ago

>I've come across SEO guys who insist they have the secrets to modern SEO If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him. My experience is that there's 3 things that work: 1. Write a lot. No matter how much research you do, you can't predict what will rank. You can increase the odds, but there are no guarantees. In the context of a software company (one of my previous jobs) do customer support and post in-depth answers to support questions. Write about users' success stories. Write about product features that might be hard to understand. Write about industry issues. Eventually you'll start to get some results. It's not an overnight thing. 2. Keep writing. If you think you're writing enough, you probably aren't. 3. Build relationships in you domain. Contact other companies serving the same audience who aren't your competitors. Post on message boards and Facebook groups without ever selling anything. Give away the most valuable thing you have: expert knowledge. People will read what you write and share/link to it. I know it's much easier to just write the whole thing off as scams and hucksters, but good writing is what it's all about today. I'll add a big caveat that there are MANY industries I don't know the landscape of. In the past, I've written in-house for largeish ecom and saas companies. Currently I work for an agency on a variety of clients, mostly smaller local businesses.

cookiecaper 10y ago
So if you throw enough at the shit at the wall, eventually something will stick, in the sense that someone will link to it. That hardly seems like a viable or repeatable "strategy" for increasing search rank. My personal experience with this, after paying for months of professional content writing, is that you get a few people posting links on their zero-PageRank Wordpress blogs and you get a few people attempting to share links or spread the word, but over-aggressive forum admins have filters that automatically remove all off-domain hyperlinks, and, in some cases, openly-hostile admins will remove any link to or mention of anything that isn't their own site. One of the largest forums in our niche had this policy; if you didn't pay them $5k for an ad package, any mention of your site whatsoever would be removed. You also get competitors, often large ones, blatantly ripping/reskinning your content without giving any credit, and then everyone shares the link from the better-known source instead. Google claims that good content is key, but what they mean is that "good content will get links, so links mean content is good, so we just count links". The premise that links correlate with quality is no longer valid in 2017. People no longer puts links on the internet to content they like, at least not in the format that Google expects and/or is able to access. The simple fact is that Google is made for the web past, and that it doesn't work on the web as it stands. Our competitor had only 2-3 publicly visible pages that informed on the mechanics of their service and provided 0 related content. We had a blog that featured new posts with updates that were relevant to the niche almost-daily, including fully original high-quality photo essays with abundant explanatory text. Despite this, with a little bit of spam voodoo, they blew us away on SEO in every non-long-tail keyword.