4 ms·
There are people who try and people who simply make money selling snake oil.
by Sebb767 4y ago
There are people who try and people who simply make money selling snake oil.
- xwdv 4y agoSEO is such a moving target you have to sell some snake oil to survive long in the business.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoIs this really true? Are there no honest people to work with out there?
- dbg31415 4y agoThere are, but... like most of the technical SEO stuff where you can be honest is done now. Use unique titles, don't have multiple H1s, etc. A lot of that stuff was actually useful 5-10 years back when most sites were really shit at the technical side of SEO. Any more... it's all the soft, subjective stuff. And companies gotta bill hours. So most "SEO" folks are really just content folks, not technical in any way shape or form. And they know without that job they're back to flipping burgers, so they're gonna sell you a lot of shit you don't really need. Often lie about you needing shit to justify their existence.
- martin_a 4y agoI second this. All of their work, besides technical SEO, can be useless and even actively damage your rankings after a minor Google update on a rainy Thursday afternoon. There's no hard proof any of the stuff they sell you really works, because _nobody_, contrary to what SEO consultants might tell you, knows how those rankings really work. It's just a guessing game. Do good technical SEO (including performance + accessibility) and don't do what SEO agencies tell you. That should get you decent rankings over time.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago> actively damage your rankings after a minor Google update on a rainy Thursday afternoon If I were Google, I'd be making these changes all the time specifically to trash the profitability of SEO which damages the usefulness of results. By randomising out the effectiveness of any SEO method, the central limit would just be the actual content. Assuming they are actually aiming for useful results, and not, say, profitable results (like, say, blogspam and mirror websites that have more ads than the originals).
- xwdv 4y agoThey are aiming for profitable results.
- azinman2 4y agoSo if no one knows what really works, how can one do “good technical SEO” outside of performance and access ability?
- xwdv 4y agoYou can’t. It’s snake oil.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago> _nobody_, contrary to what SEO consultants might tell you, knows how those rankings really work This reminds me very much of "Conjoiner drives" in Alastair Reynold's books. Designed by a very advanced post-human hive-mind (the Conjoiners), they are sold to normal humans to power starships. No non-Conjoiner understands how they work, and any attempt to find out is prohibited and can result in massive reprisals by the Conjoiners. The engines have a few (6) dials to set parameters, and a few readouts from green to red. What the dials actually do and what the displays represent are not known, but the ability to run faster is critical to a starship. Drivemasters keep complex logs of the effects of changing the dials slightly on their ship, and swap their guesswork about the effects with other ships. But! Mess with the dials too much, drive into the red, and the drives detonate in an enormous explosion. Try to open a drive, or separate one of a pair from another, and they detonate.
- dieselgate 4y agoYa some other comments mentioned similar but when I work on SEO as a dev most of the times it’s adding stuff like “structured data” JSON elements to a page to help with crawlers. And the singular H1 elements are always big haha. Guess this would be considered technical seo but I didn’t know the distinction was ever made. What do I know though just a code monkey