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The Web Developer and His Wife (A Fairy Tale)
- geuis 18y agoumm ok. What was the point of that story.
- amjith 18y agoToo much SEO is potentially harmful.
- benmathes 18y agoThere's a more insidious meaning in that article: Men are reasonable and don't want more than they need but have no balls to stand up to a wife that keeps wanting her husband to get MORE MORE MORE. The SEO stuff could be abstracted over and it would just be a folk story.
- ph0rque 18y agoI assume it's based on "The Fisherman and His Wife", a Russian fairy tale with virtually an identical plot.
- huhtenberg 18y agoBy Mr. Pushkin no less :) Here's a translated version for everyone else's reference - http://home.freeuk.com/russica4/books/goldfish/gfish.html http://home.freeuk.com/russica4/books/goldfish/gfish.html
- d0mine 18y agoHere's a soviet cartoon film "Сказка о рыбаке и рыбке" http://rutube.ru/tracks/749406.html http://rutube.ru/tracks/749406.html
- Tichy 18y agoSometimes it is better to not make bad copies of good things.
- swombat 18y agoYou know, that's the exact formula for making great things.
- BigZaphod 18y agoYikes. I feel like I just wasted a part of my life looking for some punch line. Bah.
- jcapote 18y agoWow. How is this number 2? Bad HN!
- AndyKelley 18y agommm, candy
- Harkins 18y agoThis is obviously a fairy tale, no SEO consultant would ever give a quantified, testable prediction of the effects of their work.
- wmeredith 18y agoOh, bullshit. I'm an SEO. You'll find a link to a downloadable pdf case study right here: http://www.voltagecreative.com/search-engine-optimization.php http://www.voltagecreative.com/search-engine-optimization.ph... True, many SEO are snake oil salesmen, but not me or my firm. We back our SEM program with results. </mild-overreaction>
- alex_c 18y agoI'm sorry to say, but my first reaction was "How much are they charging for the PDF?" There are a LOT of SEO snake oil salesmen out there. Or maybe there aren't that many, but they're bad/loud/obnoxious enough to give the majority a bad name. Unfortunately, the result is the same...
- Harkins 18y agoSo, when hired, you'll make a specific claim like "You'll see a 462% increase in traffic from organic search engine results in 2 weeks."? Your case study is pretty, but it's not predictive, you just say "We did [proprietary stuff redacted] and afterwards traffic jumped." I'd be impressed if you'd published this PDF beforehand and said "We'll increase traffic to the site at least 3x by 2 weeks from today." and your case study was about how you did or didn't meet that specific goal. (And don't even get me started on the fact that the site with the big percentage increase went from 5 daily visitors to 25, or that you seem to claim that your changes were instantly reflected in search engine rankings.) I'm not saying what you do is snake oil, just that I've never seen an SEO confident enough to make a testable, quanitified promise. It doesn't sound like you're making them, either.
- robfitz 18y agothat made me sad (that i spent the time) =(
- Tichy 18y agoThe interesting lesson is that this trivial story made it to a high spot on Hacker News. It is just as with that satire of xkcd: just put some stick figures on whatever you have to say, and people will love it. Obviously it works with fairy tales, too. Then again the lesson is not that interesting, it was known before.
- pchristensen 18y agoUnless it was not known and storytelling is a good way to communicate a lesson.
- Tichy 18y agoTo be honest, I thought the story was rather stupid. The lesson about SEO would have been more digestible as a "top ten SEO tricks list", and there really is nothing wrong with continuously trying to improve one's site. It is not an unavoidable consequence of trying to improve one's site to end up using black hat SEO tricks. So the story was plain wrong. Maybe the one moral is to not rely on SEO consultants because they might do stuff to your site that is not really beneficial - OK. But to make that single point, the story was too long.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]