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In my experience SEO experts are the most superstitious tech people I ever met. One guy wanted me to reorder HTTP header fields to match another site. He wanted

In my experience SEO experts are the most superstitious tech people I ever met. One guy wanted me to reorder HTTP header fields to match another site. He wanted our minified HTML to include a linebreak just after a certain meta element just because some other site had it. I got requests to match variable names in minified JS just because googles own minified JS had that name.

cde-v 3y ago
Considering their job can be done by literally anyone, they have to differentiate somehow
Dalewyn 3y ago
>our minified HTML Unreadable source code is a crime against humanity.
- henriquez 3y ago
  It’s also a crime against zorgons from Planet Zomblaki.
- hnick 3y ago
  Is minified "code" still "source code"? I think I'd say the source is the original implementation pre-minification. I hate it too when working out how something is done on a site, but I'm wondering where we fall on that technicality. Is the output of a pre-processor still considered source code even if it's not machine code? These are not important questions but now I'm wondering.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    The minified HTML (and, god forbid, JavaShit) is the source from which the browser ultimately renders a page, so yes that is source code.
    - naniwaduni 3y ago
      "The ISA bytecode is the source from which the processor ultimately executes a program, so yes that is source code."
      - hunter2_ 3y ago
        I suppose the difference is that someone debugging at that level will be offered some sort of "dump" command or similar, whereas someone debugging in a browser is offered a "View Source" command. It's just a matter of convention and expectation. If we wanted browsers to be fed code that for performance reasons isn't human-readable, web servers ought to serve something that's processed way more than just gzipped minification. It could be more like bytecode.
        panzi 3y ago
        If you need to use prettiefy to even have a chance to understand the code, is it still source code? About the byte code: You mean wasm? (Guess that's what you're alluding to.)
        flusensieb 3y ago
        If you need syntax highlighting and an easy way to navigate between files to understand a large code base, is it still source code?
        phatskat 3y ago
        > It could be more like bytecode. Isn’t this essential what WebAssembly is doing? I’ll admit I haven’t looked into it much, as I’m crap with C/++, though I’d like to try Rust. Having “near native” performance in a browser sounds nice, curious to see how far it’s come.
        Dalewyn 3y ago
        >If we wanted browsers to be fed code that for performance reasons isn't human-readable, Worth keeping in mind that "performance" here refers to saving bandwidth costs as the host. Every single unnecessary whitespace or character is a byte that didn't need to be uploaded, hence minify and save on that bandwidth and thus $$$$. The performance difference on the browser end between original and minified source code is negligible.
  - gmerc 3y ago
    and does an LLM care … it feels like minification doesn’t stop one form explaining the code at all.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Source code is what you write and read, but sometimes you write one thing and people can only read it after your pre processing. Why not enable pretty output? Plus I suspect minifying HTML or JS is often cargo cult (for small sites who are frying the wrong fish) or compensating for page bloat
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      It does stuff like tree shaking as well; it's quite good. If your page is bloated, it makes it better. If your page is not bloated, it makes it better.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        Tree-shaking is orthogonal to minification tho.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        That's true.
    - dgb23 3y ago
      It doesn't compensate bloat, but it reduces bytes sent over the wire, bytes cached in between and bytes parsed in your browser for _very_ little cost. You can always open dev tools in your browser and have an interactive, nicely formatted HTML tree there with a ton of inspection and manipulation features.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        In my experience usually the bigger difference is made by not making it bloated in the first place... As well as progressive enhancement, nonblocking load, serving from a nearby geolocation etc. I see projects minify all the things by default while it should be literally the last measure with least impact on TTI
- vasco 3y ago
  Nobody tell this guy about compilers.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  So I guess you think compiled code is even worse, right?
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    I mean, isn't that precisely why open source advocates advocate for open source? Not to mention, there is no need to "minify" HTML, CSS, or JavaShit for a browser to render a page unlike compiled code which is more or less a necessity for such things.
    - hunter2_ 3y ago
      If someone releases only a minified version of their code, and licenses it as free as can be, is it open source?
      - naniwaduni 3y ago
        The popular licenses for which this is a design concern are careful to define source code to mean "preferred form of the work for making modifications" or similar.
      - zauguin 3y ago
        According to the Open Source Definition of the OSI it's not: > The program must include source code [...] The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor [...] are not allowed.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      Minifying code for browsers greatly reduces the amount of bandwidth needed to serve web traffic. There's a good reason it's done. By your logic, there's actually no reason to use compiled code at all, for almost anything above the kernel. We can just use Python to do everything, including run browsers, play video games, etc. Sure, it'll be dog-slow, but you seem to care more about reading the code than performance or any other consideration.
- SahAssar 3y ago
  Minifying HTML is basically just removing non-significant whitespace. Run it through a formatter and it will be readable. If you dislike unreadable source code I would assume you would object to minifying JS, in which case you should ask people to include sourcemaps instead of objecting to minification.
CharlesW 3y ago
> In my experience SEO experts are the most superstitious tech people I ever met. And some are the most data-driven people you'll ever meet. As with most people who claim to be experts, the trick is to determine whether the person you're evaluating is a legitimate professional or a cargo-culting wanna-be.
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  I’ve always felt there is a similarity to day traders or people who overanalyze stock fundamentals. There comes a time when data analysis becomes astrology…
  - andirk 3y ago
    > There comes a time when data analysis becomes astrology. Excellent quote. It's counterintuitive but looking at what is most likely to happen according to the datasets presented can often miss the bigger picture.
    - reacharavindh 3y ago
      This. It is often the scope and context that determines logic. It is easy to build bubbles and stay comfy inside. Without revealing much, I asked a data scientist whose job it is to figure out bids on keywords and essentially control how much $ is spent on advertising something at a specific region about negative criteria. As in, are you sure you wouldn’t get this benefit even if you stopped spending the $ and his response was “look at all this evidence that our spend caused this x% increase in traffic and y% more conversions” and that was 2 years ago. My follow up question was - okay, now that the thing you advertised is popular, wouldn’t it be the more organic choice in the market, and we can stop spending the $ there? His answer was - look at what happened when we stopped the advertising in this small region in Germany 1.5 years ago! My common sense validation question still stands. I still believe he built a shiny good bubble 2 years ago, and refuses to reason with wider context, and second degree effects.
      - 3y ago
brendank310 3y ago
I think you're largely correct but Google isn't one person so there may be somewhat emergent patterns that work from an SEO standpoint that don't have a solid answer to Why. If I were an SEO customer I would ask for some proof but that isn't the market they're targeting. There was an old saying in the tennis instruction business that there was a bunch of 'bend your knees, fifty please'. So lots of snakeoil salesman but some salesman sell stuff that works.
adrianmsmith 3y ago
One SEO expert who consulted for a bank I worked at wanted us to change our URLs from e.g. /products/savings-accounts/apply by reversing them to /apply/savings-accounts/products on the grounds that the most specific thing about the page must be as close to the domain name as possible, according to them. I actually went ahead and changed our CMS to implement this (because I was told to). I'm sure the SEO expert got paid a lot more than I did as a dev. A sad day in my career. I left the company not long after...
- ElongatedMusket 3y ago
  But that's wrong... Do breadcrumbs get larger as you move away from the loaf? No!
- oneshtein 3y ago
  It's just a URL rewrite rule for nginx proxy.
  - SahAssar 3y ago
    If you want all your canonical urls to be wrong and every navigation to include a redirect, sure.
  - raxxorraxor 3y ago
    Even if that measurably improves the ranking of your website, it still would be a bullshit job. Also cries for side effects, especially on the web.
- pembrook 3y ago
  Unfortunately though, this was likely good advice. The yandex source code leak revealed that keyword proximity to root domain is a ranking factor. Of course, there’s nearly a thousand factors and “randomize result” is also a factor, but still. SEO is unfortunately a zero sum game so it makes otherwise silly activities become positive ROI.
  - AniseAbyss 3y ago
tyingq 3y ago
That's a bit out there, but Google has mentioned in several different ways that pages and sites have thousands of derived features and attributes they feed into their various ML pipelines. I assume Google is turning all the site's pages, js, inbound/outbound links, traffic patterns, etc...into large numbers of sometimes obscure datapoints like "does it have a favicon", "is it a unique favicon?", "do people scroll past the initial viewport?", "does it have this known uncommon attribute?". Maybe those aren't the right guesses, but if a page has thousands of derived features and attributes, maybe they are on the list. So, some SEO's take the idea that they can identify sites that Google clearly showers with traffic, and try to recreate as close a list of those features/attributes as they can for the site they are being paid to boost. I agree it's an odd approach, but I also can't prove it's wrong.

cde-v 3y ago

Considering their job can be done by literally anyone, they have to differentiate somehow

Dalewyn 3y ago

>our minified HTML Unreadable source code is a crime against humanity.

henriquez 3y ago
It’s also a crime against zorgons from Planet Zomblaki.
hnick 3y ago
Is minified "code" still "source code"? I think I'd say the source is the original implementation pre-minification. I hate it too when working out how something is done on a site, but I'm wondering where we fall on that technicality. Is the output of a pre-processor still considered source code even if it's not machine code? These are not important questions but now I'm wondering.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  The minified HTML (and, god forbid, JavaShit) is the source from which the browser ultimately renders a page, so yes that is source code.
  - naniwaduni 3y ago
    "The ISA bytecode is the source from which the processor ultimately executes a program, so yes that is source code."
    - hunter2_ 3y ago
      I suppose the difference is that someone debugging at that level will be offered some sort of "dump" command or similar, whereas someone debugging in a browser is offered a "View Source" command. It's just a matter of convention and expectation. If we wanted browsers to be fed code that for performance reasons isn't human-readable, web servers ought to serve something that's processed way more than just gzipped minification. It could be more like bytecode.
      - panzi 3y ago
        If you need to use prettiefy to even have a chance to understand the code, is it still source code? About the byte code: You mean wasm? (Guess that's what you're alluding to.)
        flusensieb 3y ago
        If you need syntax highlighting and an easy way to navigate between files to understand a large code base, is it still source code?
      - phatskat 3y ago
        > It could be more like bytecode. Isn’t this essential what WebAssembly is doing? I’ll admit I haven’t looked into it much, as I’m crap with C/++, though I’d like to try Rust. Having “near native” performance in a browser sounds nice, curious to see how far it’s come.
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
        >If we wanted browsers to be fed code that for performance reasons isn't human-readable, Worth keeping in mind that "performance" here refers to saving bandwidth costs as the host. Every single unnecessary whitespace or character is a byte that didn't need to be uploaded, hence minify and save on that bandwidth and thus $$$$. The performance difference on the browser end between original and minified source code is negligible.
- gmerc 3y ago
  and does an LLM care … it feels like minification doesn’t stop one form explaining the code at all.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Source code is what you write and read, but sometimes you write one thing and people can only read it after your pre processing. Why not enable pretty output? Plus I suspect minifying HTML or JS is often cargo cult (for small sites who are frying the wrong fish) or compensating for page bloat
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    It does stuff like tree shaking as well; it's quite good. If your page is bloated, it makes it better. If your page is not bloated, it makes it better.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      Tree-shaking is orthogonal to minification tho.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        That's true.
  - dgb23 3y ago
    It doesn't compensate bloat, but it reduces bytes sent over the wire, bytes cached in between and bytes parsed in your browser for _very_ little cost. You can always open dev tools in your browser and have an interactive, nicely formatted HTML tree there with a ton of inspection and manipulation features.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      In my experience usually the bigger difference is made by not making it bloated in the first place... As well as progressive enhancement, nonblocking load, serving from a nearby geolocation etc. I see projects minify all the things by default while it should be literally the last measure with least impact on TTI
vasco 3y ago
Nobody tell this guy about compilers.
midoridensha 3y ago
So I guess you think compiled code is even worse, right?
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  I mean, isn't that precisely why open source advocates advocate for open source? Not to mention, there is no need to "minify" HTML, CSS, or JavaShit for a browser to render a page unlike compiled code which is more or less a necessity for such things.
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    If someone releases only a minified version of their code, and licenses it as free as can be, is it open source?
    - naniwaduni 3y ago
      The popular licenses for which this is a design concern are careful to define source code to mean "preferred form of the work for making modifications" or similar.
    - zauguin 3y ago
      According to the Open Source Definition of the OSI it's not: > The program must include source code [...] The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor [...] are not allowed.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    Minifying code for browsers greatly reduces the amount of bandwidth needed to serve web traffic. There's a good reason it's done. By your logic, there's actually no reason to use compiled code at all, for almost anything above the kernel. We can just use Python to do everything, including run browsers, play video games, etc. Sure, it'll be dog-slow, but you seem to care more about reading the code than performance or any other consideration.
SahAssar 3y ago
Minifying HTML is basically just removing non-significant whitespace. Run it through a formatter and it will be readable. If you dislike unreadable source code I would assume you would object to minifying JS, in which case you should ask people to include sourcemaps instead of objecting to minification.

CharlesW 3y ago

> In my experience SEO experts are the most superstitious tech people I ever met. And some are the most data-driven people you'll ever meet. As with most people who claim to be experts, the trick is to determine whether the person you're evaluating is a legitimate professional or a cargo-culting wanna-be.

edmundsauto 3y ago
I’ve always felt there is a similarity to day traders or people who overanalyze stock fundamentals. There comes a time when data analysis becomes astrology…
- andirk 3y ago
  > There comes a time when data analysis becomes astrology. Excellent quote. It's counterintuitive but looking at what is most likely to happen according to the datasets presented can often miss the bigger picture.
  - reacharavindh 3y ago
    This. It is often the scope and context that determines logic. It is easy to build bubbles and stay comfy inside. Without revealing much, I asked a data scientist whose job it is to figure out bids on keywords and essentially control how much $ is spent on advertising something at a specific region about negative criteria. As in, are you sure you wouldn’t get this benefit even if you stopped spending the $ and his response was “look at all this evidence that our spend caused this x% increase in traffic and y% more conversions” and that was 2 years ago. My follow up question was - okay, now that the thing you advertised is popular, wouldn’t it be the more organic choice in the market, and we can stop spending the $ there? His answer was - look at what happened when we stopped the advertising in this small region in Germany 1.5 years ago! My common sense validation question still stands. I still believe he built a shiny good bubble 2 years ago, and refuses to reason with wider context, and second degree effects.
    - 3y ago

brendank310 3y ago

I think you're largely correct but Google isn't one person so there may be somewhat emergent patterns that work from an SEO standpoint that don't have a solid answer to Why. If I were an SEO customer I would ask for some proof but that isn't the market they're targeting. There was an old saying in the tennis instruction business that there was a bunch of 'bend your knees, fifty please'. So lots of snakeoil salesman but some salesman sell stuff that works.

adrianmsmith 3y ago

One SEO expert who consulted for a bank I worked at wanted us to change our URLs from e.g. /products/savings-accounts/apply by reversing them to /apply/savings-accounts/products on the grounds that the most specific thing about the page must be as close to the domain name as possible, according to them. I actually went ahead and changed our CMS to implement this (because I was told to). I'm sure the SEO expert got paid a lot more than I did as a dev. A sad day in my career. I left the company not long after...

ElongatedMusket 3y ago
But that's wrong... Do breadcrumbs get larger as you move away from the loaf? No!
oneshtein 3y ago
It's just a URL rewrite rule for nginx proxy.
- SahAssar 3y ago
  If you want all your canonical urls to be wrong and every navigation to include a redirect, sure.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  Even if that measurably improves the ranking of your website, it still would be a bullshit job. Also cries for side effects, especially on the web.
pembrook 3y ago
Unfortunately though, this was likely good advice. The yandex source code leak revealed that keyword proximity to root domain is a ranking factor. Of course, there’s nearly a thousand factors and “randomize result” is also a factor, but still. SEO is unfortunately a zero sum game so it makes otherwise silly activities become positive ROI.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago

tyingq 3y ago

That's a bit out there, but Google has mentioned in several different ways that pages and sites have thousands of derived features and attributes they feed into their various ML pipelines. I assume Google is turning all the site's pages, js, inbound/outbound links, traffic patterns, etc...into large numbers of sometimes obscure datapoints like "does it have a favicon", "is it a unique favicon?", "do people scroll past the initial viewport?", "does it have this known uncommon attribute?". Maybe those aren't the right guesses, but if a page has thousands of derived features and attributes, maybe they are on the list. So, some SEO's take the idea that they can identify sites that Google clearly showers with traffic, and try to recreate as close a list of those features/attributes as they can for the site they are being paid to boost. I agree it's an odd approach, but I also can't prove it's wrong.