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There's some mix of people in here who weren't around for or forgot about when Google handled stuff like this brilliantly. In fact, one of the best ways to get
by Kye 4y ago
There's some mix of people in here who weren't around for or forgot about when Google handled stuff like this brilliantly. In fact, one of the best ways to get search traffic was to write a quality article tackling questions like this. Google was thirsty for answers to the ever-growing number of queries it had never seen before and would shower traffic on anyone who answered them even if it was a bad answer. A good answer had staying power.
- samatman 4y agoThe sobering realization is that a lot of the quality phpbb forums which would answer these questions, and link-juice quality posts, got shuttered a long time ago. Google could find them on Archive but we both know that's not the business.
- shadowgovt 4y agoI was there for it. It worked for a select group of toy problem domains and the answer for most high-concept searches would be noise or nothing. The author never manages to convince me that the information they're looking for is on the Internet for Google to index in the first place. The author then asserts "don't just hit me with garbage," which is a fine assertion, except what they're interpreting as 'garbage' is the information other people making the search could actually use. Google A/B tested the hell out of "say nothing" vs. "guess something close to what the requester might care about" and the latter won out every time.