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Or you can just create. The beauty of just creating is that when you build something really, really good, the links will flow to your site. Thought experiment:

Or you can just create. The beauty of just creating is that when you build something really, really good, the links will flow to your site. Thought experiment: Ok. I just wrote a page offering to give away 20 bucks to the first thousand people that read it. Let's say I am rich and can afford to give the money away. Can't get any more interesting and traffic-worthy than that, right? Heck, this is the kind of thing you'd want to send links to your friends, right? So tell me where it is. SEO is marketing, plain and simple. That means that there is an active component to it -- sharing links on HN, phoning some friends, making some posters for the dorm. Whatever. The value of what you output has nothing to do with some sort of inherent quality. It has to do with how many people you can expose your content to and what ratio of those people are going to like what they see enough to give you a link. SEO is not quality. It's popularity. People don't link to you because you wrote great stuff, they link to you because they like you, are a fan, want to look cool, etc. These are all things that you actively have to go out and cultivate. To say it's all passive is to miss the entire point and to pander to the audience. With all the keyword optimization going on with that page, and the fact that the entire tone of the article is pitched directly to HN and hacker-types, I can't help but feel that author knows better. (I don't mean that as a slam. Perhaps I am the guy in the audience that spoils how the magician's trick is done. If so, I apologize)

Jabbles 16y ago
"SEO is not quality. It's popularity" Search Engines' goals are (probably) to show people the way to the "best content". Whilst they use "popularity" as a metric at the moment, we don't know how that will change. As they adjust their algorithms they will find more ingenious ways of finding "the best content" (I can't define that), making so called "optimizations" useless. Your thought experiment works, but only in the absence of perfect (or futuristic) search engines. If Google's NLP power massively increased, and they'd indexed your site, I'm sure it would be found, even if no one had linked to it. It's the search engine's job to find it. Current methods of SEO are violating the encapsulation we usually have around the search engine (a black box function string -> URL[]). SEO is looking into how SEs work and trying to game the system. That's fine, but as SEs improves SEO will move more towards "Content is King".
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  I've been observing SEO for several years, and out of all the things I've learned as a technologist, SEO is the most frustrating. It's consistently murky and unpalatable to me as a programmer because of it's lack of logic. And as far as pointing out how it works, I'm not happy with the state of affairs. I've simply decided that I'm going to talk frankly about how I understand it. Maybe you guys can straighten me out. I see so much posturing on SEO -- even by the guys who claim to be "shooting straight" that it's discouraging. The problem you have is that you are trying to describe a system that has no specification. That is, there is no testable definition of "best content" that is repeatable and applicable to all users. After all, this was google's entire schtick -- the reason everybody thought it was cool was because they managed to hack the problem better than anybody else had up until then. But there is no solution. It's not that kind of problem. One of the reasons SEO drives me nuts is that the concepts we are so used to in programming, "black box", "answer", "best content", "user", etc -- don't really have firm meanings in the way we would like them to. Yes, it would be awesome if there was a little magic box that told me what to do (or gave me all the answers) but -- and this is important -- even if there was, it wouldn't be a black box. We live in a digital age. Anything that can be put into code is instantly commoditized. There is another assumption here that is equally slippery (aside from the fuzzy nature of all the adjectives and the impossibility of making the system opaque), and that is the idea that somehow one can determine content quality mechanically. That's like saying you can pick the "best" painting at an art show by using some kind of hand-held scanner and an image-processing algorithm. Content is about people interacting with people -- it's not deterministic. We are not machines. We keep wanting Search Engines to work like the library: go to the card catalog, pick a topic, find authoritative sources. But they keep working like the dance hall: show up with your best suit, make some friends, and work the crowd, become popular. That's frustrating. But as one SEO expert told me in a recent interview[1], if you don't use social signals (popularity), how else would you do it? This is the way we've been judging content since 3 guys sat around in a cave looking at mammoth drawings. [1](If you have time, you might want to listen to the interview. I tried to touch on this exact subject because I know how touchy an issue SEO is: http://www.hn-books.com/Books/SEOMoz.htm#the_video http://www.hn-books.com/Books/SEOMoz.htm#the_video )
  - 16y ago
alexophile 16y ago
I've always liked the pyramid analogy (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundamentals-pyramid http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundame...) - once you have quality content, you can build traffic by using higher order strategies. The better you are at creating the former, the less you have to rely on the latter.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  I agree. Content that directly speaks to a target audience is a force-multiplier. The only thing I would add is that "quality content" means "sticky", "viral", or "emotionally powerful" -- it does not mean authoritative, comprehensive, or any of a dozen other adjectives folks would think of when you use the phrase "quality content" Even if you took SEO and links out of the equation, the goal is to get folks talking about what you are doing. If you care about people seeing your work, accomplishing that is the only metric against which you can measure "quality", unfortunately. The corollary to all of that, of course, is that folks simply don't get all that worked up about a lot of stuff. When's the last time you got excited about your laundry detergent and told somebody? Probably never. So the guys in the low-emotional-impact zone have to compete using rules made for that Bieber kid. It has to be a very difficult situation to be in.
  - notyetdeleted 16y ago
    True, but it's amazing what some people in the low impact zone can actually do. One example that comes to mind is 'will it blend?'. They sell blenders, not very exciting, but everyone seems to know that phrase. Their YouTube videos pull in millions of views, and they're just tossing random gadgets in their blender. It emphasizes the quality of their product, and it gets people excited and linking to the content. They took a kitchen appliance and turned it into an internet sensation. Inspiring.
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Jabbles 16y ago

"SEO is not quality. It's popularity" Search Engines' goals are (probably) to show people the way to the "best content". Whilst they use "popularity" as a metric at the moment, we don't know how that will change. As they adjust their algorithms they will find more ingenious ways of finding "the best content" (I can't define that), making so called "optimizations" useless. Your thought experiment works, but only in the absence of perfect (or futuristic) search engines. If Google's NLP power massively increased, and they'd indexed your site, I'm sure it would be found, even if no one had linked to it. It's the search engine's job to find it. Current methods of SEO are violating the encapsulation we usually have around the search engine (a black box function string -> URL[]). SEO is looking into how SEs work and trying to game the system. That's fine, but as SEs improves SEO will move more towards "Content is King".

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I've been observing SEO for several years, and out of all the things I've learned as a technologist, SEO is the most frustrating. It's consistently murky and unpalatable to me as a programmer because of it's lack of logic. And as far as pointing out how it works, I'm not happy with the state of affairs. I've simply decided that I'm going to talk frankly about how I understand it. Maybe you guys can straighten me out. I see so much posturing on SEO -- even by the guys who claim to be "shooting straight" that it's discouraging. The problem you have is that you are trying to describe a system that has no specification. That is, there is no testable definition of "best content" that is repeatable and applicable to all users. After all, this was google's entire schtick -- the reason everybody thought it was cool was because they managed to hack the problem better than anybody else had up until then. But there is no solution. It's not that kind of problem. One of the reasons SEO drives me nuts is that the concepts we are so used to in programming, "black box", "answer", "best content", "user", etc -- don't really have firm meanings in the way we would like them to. Yes, it would be awesome if there was a little magic box that told me what to do (or gave me all the answers) but -- and this is important -- even if there was, it wouldn't be a black box. We live in a digital age. Anything that can be put into code is instantly commoditized. There is another assumption here that is equally slippery (aside from the fuzzy nature of all the adjectives and the impossibility of making the system opaque), and that is the idea that somehow one can determine content quality mechanically. That's like saying you can pick the "best" painting at an art show by using some kind of hand-held scanner and an image-processing algorithm. Content is about people interacting with people -- it's not deterministic. We are not machines. We keep wanting Search Engines to work like the library: go to the card catalog, pick a topic, find authoritative sources. But they keep working like the dance hall: show up with your best suit, make some friends, and work the crowd, become popular. That's frustrating. But as one SEO expert told me in a recent interview[1], if you don't use social signals (popularity), how else would you do it? This is the way we've been judging content since 3 guys sat around in a cave looking at mammoth drawings. [1](If you have time, you might want to listen to the interview. I tried to touch on this exact subject because I know how touchy an issue SEO is: http://www.hn-books.com/Books/SEOMoz.htm#the_video http://www.hn-books.com/Books/SEOMoz.htm#the_video )
- 16y ago

alexophile 16y ago

I've always liked the pyramid analogy (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundamentals-pyramid http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundame...) - once you have quality content, you can build traffic by using higher order strategies. The better you are at creating the former, the less you have to rely on the latter.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I agree. Content that directly speaks to a target audience is a force-multiplier. The only thing I would add is that "quality content" means "sticky", "viral", or "emotionally powerful" -- it does not mean authoritative, comprehensive, or any of a dozen other adjectives folks would think of when you use the phrase "quality content" Even if you took SEO and links out of the equation, the goal is to get folks talking about what you are doing. If you care about people seeing your work, accomplishing that is the only metric against which you can measure "quality", unfortunately. The corollary to all of that, of course, is that folks simply don't get all that worked up about a lot of stuff. When's the last time you got excited about your laundry detergent and told somebody? Probably never. So the guys in the low-emotional-impact zone have to compete using rules made for that Bieber kid. It has to be a very difficult situation to be in.
- notyetdeleted 16y ago
  True, but it's amazing what some people in the low impact zone can actually do. One example that comes to mind is 'will it blend?'. They sell blenders, not very exciting, but everyone seems to know that phrase. Their YouTube videos pull in millions of views, and they're just tossing random gadgets in their blender. It emphasizes the quality of their product, and it gets people excited and linking to the content. They took a kitchen appliance and turned it into an internet sensation. Inspiring.

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