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It's not. In addition to what ad404b8a372f2b9 said in a sibling comment: - nobody in the West cares about Yandex SERPs and Yandex isn't Google, so you can't ea

It's not. In addition to what ad404b8a372f2b9 said in a sibling comment: - nobody in the West cares about Yandex SERPs and Yandex isn't Google, so you can't easily transfer the factors - Your favorite SERPs aren't being overtaken by SEO garbage because they're not big/profitable enough to catch attention. It's really more of a dark forest thing in SEO, and search volume is how you detect prey. SEOs don't care about things they cannot make a lot of money from. - SEOs aren't that technical. They employ some technical people (me for instance), but they don't listen to technical people, they care about links links links links, headlines, title, description, microdata (for fancier Google SERP display because having a fancy display can make rank 2 work just as well as rank 1) and keywords. Some do keyword-related stuff like WDF*IDF, but it's more of a ritual where they throw text into different tools and wait for all lamps to turn green. They're really not that sophisticated. Source: am working for large affiliates with millions of visits per month.

asah 4y ago
I'm curious: how much of modern SEO is low-level trickery, and how much is deeper marketing strategy ?
- luckylion 4y ago
  From my understanding, they're somewhat distinct. There are blackhats that try to exploit some quirk and shoot for quick & good rankings that get killed when Google notices or patches a bug etc. The people I work for are mostly light-grey-hats and don't usually do this because they run large sites they don't want to put at risk and they're very conservative about changing anything and doing anything that could be remotely viewed as malicious by Google (even when it's obviously not malicious and would be good for users, there's a lot of "yeah, I agree, but I did/hear about/saw something somewhat similar 10 years ago and Google killed the site and it never recovered" in SEO). Everyone in SEO treats Google like a god. If you have a somewhat stable + successful project, you're sacrificing things to Google (let's all adopt AMP, yes, it's so great! let's all do CWV and say we believe in user experience!) and praise Google each day and avoid anything that you've heard might displease Google for fear of Google sending down lightning and turning your projects to ashes. If you don't have one of those golden geese, you must be more nimble and make sure that the lightning only strikes where you've been yesterday and doesn't catch up with you. The blackhat part is much more stressful (I've had clients get super depressed when their old tricks no longer worked and they burned site after site after site and nothing worked for months), and everyone I know that did that has transitioned to whitehat as soon as an opportunity presented itself and gotten rid of all the blackhat stuff to not have their main sites get caught in a penalty.
  - moneywoes 4y ago
    Given that is there anything someone without an expiring domain can do to rank besides attempt to get back links?
    - luckylion 4y ago
      I'm not terribly deep into how to rank, I mostly just build features for sites, tools for analysis etc, but from what I learn while working on those: be a trusted expert in your niche and publish stuff that the SEO editors don't understand or don't have time to learn. And then make sure you get a bunch of links. I have no idea how ML generated content will change all that, but Expertise, Authority and Trust (=EAT) is what everybody has been worried about for the past year, and whether Google will believe them that they're experts and should be trusted.
jojobas 4y ago
It is reasonable to assume there is some cross-contamination in search engine development between the two, and therefore yandex's factors might be useful for google as well.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Probably, but I don't think there's really any secret sauce they're sharing. Many of the factors are things every developer would come up with if they sat down and asked themselves "what would I do if I wanted to rank these results?". Of course, the "how exactly is it implemented", "what weight does this factor have", "can I exploit how it works" etc is another story, but if you started building a search engine and wrote down your ideas about ranking and approaches to deal with some manipulation attempt etc, I'm sure you'd come up with a lot of the same things.
ren_engineer 4y ago
>They employ some technical people (me for instance), but they don't listen to technical people what are some suggestions you make that your clients don't follow?
- luckylion 4y ago
  Not so much suggestions, it's more that they have a lot of cultish beliefs from ancient times. E.g. it takes a lot of reassurance to make them understand that Google won't consider using a CDN as negative because you'd share the IP with other sites and some of those might be bad, because it would affect most of the internet. They vastly over-estimate Google's abilities to identify patterns ("we use similar wording on other sites, that's a pattern" for wording that everyone uses, like talking about the beach distance on a hotel review, or just using bootstrap) and are like "I don't understand, but I trust you so I'll consider this okay ... for now". If some ranking drops, they're always eager to roll back any changes that were done, even if they didn't affect the frontend ("who knows how Google works"). At the same time, while they want to avoid patterns to connect their sites, they run all their sites in the same search console and analytics account. Most of them pick up very few technical things and transition from Product Management into SEO by learning how to run reports and what blogs to read for instructions. Introducing the DOM inspector is something I'm often blowing minds with, same with viewing request in the network console ("you mean I don't need the redirect tester 3000 any more?") I've only once worked for clients that had someone doing SEO who was deep into technical SEO and had all kinds of automation set up and roughly understood how HTTP works, the differences between server and client etc. Much of it is quasi-religious, I've often jokingly suggested trying to sacrifice a chicken. I'm not sure everybody laughed and never gave it some serious thoughts.
  - Dracophoenix 4y ago
    Any general recommendations for SEO blogs?
    - luckylion 4y ago
      I don't know, I don't read any :) I get involved when the SEOs have decided what to do, but I don't keep up with trends and developments.

asah 4y ago

I'm curious: how much of modern SEO is low-level trickery, and how much is deeper marketing strategy ?

luckylion 4y ago
From my understanding, they're somewhat distinct. There are blackhats that try to exploit some quirk and shoot for quick & good rankings that get killed when Google notices or patches a bug etc. The people I work for are mostly light-grey-hats and don't usually do this because they run large sites they don't want to put at risk and they're very conservative about changing anything and doing anything that could be remotely viewed as malicious by Google (even when it's obviously not malicious and would be good for users, there's a lot of "yeah, I agree, but I did/hear about/saw something somewhat similar 10 years ago and Google killed the site and it never recovered" in SEO). Everyone in SEO treats Google like a god. If you have a somewhat stable + successful project, you're sacrificing things to Google (let's all adopt AMP, yes, it's so great! let's all do CWV and say we believe in user experience!) and praise Google each day and avoid anything that you've heard might displease Google for fear of Google sending down lightning and turning your projects to ashes. If you don't have one of those golden geese, you must be more nimble and make sure that the lightning only strikes where you've been yesterday and doesn't catch up with you. The blackhat part is much more stressful (I've had clients get super depressed when their old tricks no longer worked and they burned site after site after site and nothing worked for months), and everyone I know that did that has transitioned to whitehat as soon as an opportunity presented itself and gotten rid of all the blackhat stuff to not have their main sites get caught in a penalty.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Given that is there anything someone without an expiring domain can do to rank besides attempt to get back links?
  - luckylion 4y ago
    I'm not terribly deep into how to rank, I mostly just build features for sites, tools for analysis etc, but from what I learn while working on those: be a trusted expert in your niche and publish stuff that the SEO editors don't understand or don't have time to learn. And then make sure you get a bunch of links. I have no idea how ML generated content will change all that, but Expertise, Authority and Trust (=EAT) is what everybody has been worried about for the past year, and whether Google will believe them that they're experts and should be trusted.

jojobas 4y ago

It is reasonable to assume there is some cross-contamination in search engine development between the two, and therefore yandex's factors might be useful for google as well.

luckylion 4y ago
Probably, but I don't think there's really any secret sauce they're sharing. Many of the factors are things every developer would come up with if they sat down and asked themselves "what would I do if I wanted to rank these results?". Of course, the "how exactly is it implemented", "what weight does this factor have", "can I exploit how it works" etc is another story, but if you started building a search engine and wrote down your ideas about ranking and approaches to deal with some manipulation attempt etc, I'm sure you'd come up with a lot of the same things.

ren_engineer 4y ago

>They employ some technical people (me for instance), but they don't listen to technical people what are some suggestions you make that your clients don't follow?

luckylion 4y ago
Not so much suggestions, it's more that they have a lot of cultish beliefs from ancient times. E.g. it takes a lot of reassurance to make them understand that Google won't consider using a CDN as negative because you'd share the IP with other sites and some of those might be bad, because it would affect most of the internet. They vastly over-estimate Google's abilities to identify patterns ("we use similar wording on other sites, that's a pattern" for wording that everyone uses, like talking about the beach distance on a hotel review, or just using bootstrap) and are like "I don't understand, but I trust you so I'll consider this okay ... for now". If some ranking drops, they're always eager to roll back any changes that were done, even if they didn't affect the frontend ("who knows how Google works"). At the same time, while they want to avoid patterns to connect their sites, they run all their sites in the same search console and analytics account. Most of them pick up very few technical things and transition from Product Management into SEO by learning how to run reports and what blogs to read for instructions. Introducing the DOM inspector is something I'm often blowing minds with, same with viewing request in the network console ("you mean I don't need the redirect tester 3000 any more?") I've only once worked for clients that had someone doing SEO who was deep into technical SEO and had all kinds of automation set up and roughly understood how HTTP works, the differences between server and client etc. Much of it is quasi-religious, I've often jokingly suggested trying to sacrifice a chicken. I'm not sure everybody laughed and never gave it some serious thoughts.
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  Any general recommendations for SEO blogs?
  - luckylion 4y ago
    I don't know, I don't read any :) I get involved when the SEOs have decided what to do, but I don't keep up with trends and developments.