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I don't run a web agency and make 0 dollars from selling SEO. This is not true. Google has been gamed for well over a decade. On a past enterprise, I believed

I don't run a web agency and make 0 dollars from selling SEO. This is not true. Google has been gamed for well over a decade. On a past enterprise, I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" and paid a content writer for about 9 months. She posted lengthy original content about 3 times per week, all highly relevant to the search terms we cared about. I did the same about once a week. A competitor with a private blog network and professional spam apparatus started outranking us just with "link building", i.e., posting links on the PBN they controlled, within 1 month of launching (we had about 15 months of content at this point). They had no content on their site at all, just a landing page that included a few of the keywords they were using in their link building. There was no blog, there was no "well-written, honest content for humans". Google had no qualms ranking them based on the link text despite their lack of supporting content. This competitor brutally beat us in organic search traffic until both businesses were shut down due to legal threats from a F500 cowering behind the CFAA. Our blog is still online. There is no significant search traffic to speak of. While the content may have aged some, it's still the best resource for a lot of the things we posted about. It's buried pretty deep on Google's search. Transparent spam and plagiarized content are easy for Google to detect, but private blog networks are a major component of modern SEO, as are several other non-organic schemes that Google has no simple algorithmic method to detect (barring slip-ups that make it obvious, though even in those cases, Google seems reluctant to punish domestic PBNs). I know of entire offices staffed with "link builders" whose entire job is to figure out how to get backlinks, and to be fair, "write really good original content" is somewhere on their list, but it's not very close to the top. Just a counterpoint. "SEO" is still a thing. Google is a high-value target and it's worth a lot of money to game them. It is quite naive to believe that they're impervious to it. You can rank OK with "honest, well-written content for humans" as long as no professionals are competing with you.

IllIllIllIll 9y ago
^^This. Agreed. Google is certainly advanced, but it certainly isn't fair, despite what their guidelines tell content writers and webmasters. Google wants people to write high-quality, relevant content, so they altered their guidelines to simply tell everyone to write high-quality, relevant content. Yet, just as the YouTube lottery exists -- where two creators can produce videos of similar quality and one sees enormous success and the other doesn't -- there's probably a ranking lottery. And at the end of the day, if a content moderator or employee at Google likes your content, you'll have a better chance at ranking regardless of quality.
- jackgolding 9y ago
  I'm not the best at SEO but I agree with this - it seems that writing good content is only part of the story (but an important part.) Similar to startups, I am curious as to how much of professional SEO success is about outreach. i.e. if I am mates with a uni professor and I write something about his topic, can I get a backlink from their valued .edu domain? What about .gov? Does this outrank better content? To what extent are forbes.com, entrepreneur.com, inc.com etc writers gaming this? (Or are they just looking for the virality?)
ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
I agree that sometimes it gets ‘gamed’. I didn’t realize it until I wanted to promote my own business. Ironically the ads on Google are more honest than the organic results for certain keywords, at least its out in the open it’s an ad.
dazc 9y ago
'I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" ...and paid a content writer for about 9 months.' Is paying a content writer (who's area of expertise is, usually, being a content writer) a more noble attempt at gaming the system, I wonder?
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  So yeah, SEO has changed the definition of "content writer" to mean a spam artist. However, this was a real writer, the type who went to journalism school and wrote for dead-tree publications, and she just happened to put these writings into my Wordpress interface. Her credentials on the topic were impeccable and she was hired primarily for that. Maybe it's inappropriate to call her a "content writer" if the connotation is that content writers are unambiguously spammers.
  - dazc 9y ago
    Apologies for the offence and accepting your case may be different. But, I think it's a valid question since a lot of paid for content borders on being nothing more than an SEO game plan? Paid content writers will often produce work that's well-structured, easy to read and grammatically correct but is just a rehash of something that's already been written about 100 times before. I once employed a journalist to do a piece about a particular kind of insurance. She did a fair bit of research and even got quotes from prominent people in the industry. I've seen the same piece many times in various guises, all well written but, essentially, her article with just enough of the words changed to make it 'unique'. Easy to find too since they use the quotes verbatim. When challenged the response is always the same - 'we paid someone in good faith...'
    - codingdave 9y ago
      I also think he is talking about a different type of SEO than the rest of the audience here. For most people, they run a business, and their web presence is a tool to improve that business, and SEO is a tool to improve its effectiveness. But cookiecaper seems to be talking about a totally different kind of SEO, in which the base goal is to generate traffic and monetize it, so SEO becomes the primary tool by which you look for easy keywords to target, and write content specifically for the search engines, not for a human audience supporting a pre-existing business. That entire scenario is fundamentally based on gaming SEO. It is a short-term play for cash, and some people do well with it. But we're comparing apples to oranges when trying to match that up with the way an actual business would approach SEO.
deleted 9y ago
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IllIllIllIll 9y ago

^^This. Agreed. Google is certainly advanced, but it certainly isn't fair, despite what their guidelines tell content writers and webmasters. Google wants people to write high-quality, relevant content, so they altered their guidelines to simply tell everyone to write high-quality, relevant content. Yet, just as the YouTube lottery exists -- where two creators can produce videos of similar quality and one sees enormous success and the other doesn't -- there's probably a ranking lottery. And at the end of the day, if a content moderator or employee at Google likes your content, you'll have a better chance at ranking regardless of quality.

jackgolding 9y ago
I'm not the best at SEO but I agree with this - it seems that writing good content is only part of the story (but an important part.) Similar to startups, I am curious as to how much of professional SEO success is about outreach. i.e. if I am mates with a uni professor and I write something about his topic, can I get a backlink from their valued .edu domain? What about .gov? Does this outrank better content? To what extent are forbes.com, entrepreneur.com, inc.com etc writers gaming this? (Or are they just looking for the virality?)

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago

I agree that sometimes it gets ‘gamed’. I didn’t realize it until I wanted to promote my own business. Ironically the ads on Google are more honest than the organic results for certain keywords, at least its out in the open it’s an ad.

dazc 9y ago

'I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" ...and paid a content writer for about 9 months.' Is paying a content writer (who's area of expertise is, usually, being a content writer) a more noble attempt at gaming the system, I wonder?

cookiecaper 9y ago
So yeah, SEO has changed the definition of "content writer" to mean a spam artist. However, this was a real writer, the type who went to journalism school and wrote for dead-tree publications, and she just happened to put these writings into my Wordpress interface. Her credentials on the topic were impeccable and she was hired primarily for that. Maybe it's inappropriate to call her a "content writer" if the connotation is that content writers are unambiguously spammers.
- dazc 9y ago
  Apologies for the offence and accepting your case may be different. But, I think it's a valid question since a lot of paid for content borders on being nothing more than an SEO game plan? Paid content writers will often produce work that's well-structured, easy to read and grammatically correct but is just a rehash of something that's already been written about 100 times before. I once employed a journalist to do a piece about a particular kind of insurance. She did a fair bit of research and even got quotes from prominent people in the industry. I've seen the same piece many times in various guises, all well written but, essentially, her article with just enough of the words changed to make it 'unique'. Easy to find too since they use the quotes verbatim. When challenged the response is always the same - 'we paid someone in good faith...'
  - codingdave 9y ago
    I also think he is talking about a different type of SEO than the rest of the audience here. For most people, they run a business, and their web presence is a tool to improve that business, and SEO is a tool to improve its effectiveness. But cookiecaper seems to be talking about a totally different kind of SEO, in which the base goal is to generate traffic and monetize it, so SEO becomes the primary tool by which you look for easy keywords to target, and write content specifically for the search engines, not for a human audience supporting a pre-existing business. That entire scenario is fundamentally based on gaming SEO. It is a short-term play for cash, and some people do well with it. But we're comparing apples to oranges when trying to match that up with the way an actual business would approach SEO.

deleted 9y ago

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