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I disagree with the title of this Hacker News item, but not so much the contents of the article. Fundamentally speaking, SEO is about three things: 1. Making

I disagree with the title of this Hacker News item, but not so much the contents of the article. Fundamentally speaking, SEO is about three things: 1. Making an information architecture that makes it easy for spiders and humans to find what they want (301 redirects, good top-level navigation, sitemaps, clean URLs, etc...); 2. Sending strong contextual signals to spiders about what a page / piece of content is about through anchor text, alt attributes, good title tags, and basic good web design; 3. Strategically building links to key pages. That's it - SEO in its totality isn't junk science, it's just that the hair-splitting crap that goes on at places like SEOMoz is just that: hair-splitting over minutia that really makes no practical difference at all.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>Non-brain-damaged web design and link building are 100% of SEO. You largely echo this sentiment of the article. However you're missing on 2 very important points IMO. One is that there are hidden algorithms used to determine where a page ranks in the SERPs. By testing and iterating one can determine sufficient detail to game the algorithm and produce better rankings. This is science. Hypothesise, test, analyse, improve, iterate. Two is that a minute difference in page "score" can be a lot in terms of rank and hence expected return assuming visits can be turned to sales. Certain SEOs can and do acquire and maintain top rankings. They're not doing it by doing the same as everyone else, the algo's shift and these SEOs maintain their positions. Those minutiae you're hair-splitting are like deviations to the fine-structure constant, the results cascade to greater final effects.
- Aaronontheweb 16y ago
  "By testing and iterating one can determine sufficient detail to game the algorithm and produce better rankings. This is science. Hypothesise, test, analyse, improve, iterate." The point of the article is that the people who conduct this type of research get the science wrong more often than not.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    Do you mean they don't follow the logical conclusion of the results or do you mean their hypotheses are poor? The latter is not wrong science.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago

>Non-brain-damaged web design and link building are 100% of SEO. You largely echo this sentiment of the article. However you're missing on 2 very important points IMO. One is that there are hidden algorithms used to determine where a page ranks in the SERPs. By testing and iterating one can determine sufficient detail to game the algorithm and produce better rankings. This is science. Hypothesise, test, analyse, improve, iterate. Two is that a minute difference in page "score" can be a lot in terms of rank and hence expected return assuming visits can be turned to sales. Certain SEOs can and do acquire and maintain top rankings. They're not doing it by doing the same as everyone else, the algo's shift and these SEOs maintain their positions. Those minutiae you're hair-splitting are like deviations to the fine-structure constant, the results cascade to greater final effects.

Aaronontheweb 16y ago
"By testing and iterating one can determine sufficient detail to game the algorithm and produce better rankings. This is science. Hypothesise, test, analyse, improve, iterate." The point of the article is that the people who conduct this type of research get the science wrong more often than not.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  Do you mean they don't follow the logical conclusion of the results or do you mean their hypotheses are poor? The latter is not wrong science.