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This situation is made even worse by us. Yes, us. Inbound links used to be a good quality signal: the more people link to you, the more important your site is.
by jwr 3y ago
This situation is made even worse by us. Yes, us. Inbound links used to be a good quality signal: the more people link to you, the more important your site is. And there were always link farms and SEO lowlives that abused the system. But these days it is nearly impossible to get any legitimate inbound links, because people don't have web pages and web sites anymore, instead entering all the information into silos like Twitter, Facebook, etc. These tag your links as nofollow/ugc, so they don't count towards SEO.
The net effect is that pretty much the only link signal is from link farms and paid media. If you don't crap over the internet with shady tactics, you will not appear in search results.
We lost our vote, by our own choice.
- echoangle 3y agoAre you sure that search engines don’t count nofollow links at all? I know that’s kind of the purpose but I would be surprised if they would really completely ignore them. Edit: On this page https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-n... it even says that they use all links to rank websites, even if you set them to nofollow.
- elorant 3y agoSo if I have a content site and some SEO company offers me money to publish an article am I supposed to refuse for the well being of Google’s SERP?
- cess11 3y agoNo, you refuse because affiliating with spammers is a bad thing to do.
- elorant 3y agoWho said they're spammers?
- allendoerfer 3y agoYou did. In your above post.
- elorant 3y agoA SEO company represents a plastic surgeon. They offer money to a news site to publish an advertorial. How's that spam? And that article about how to properly wash your clothes that suggests a few washing machines is also paid. That's how news media works for ages. So by your definition all these legitimate companies are spammers? Would you care to inform me how should PR be performed then?
- cess11 3y agoWhat do you mean, "legitimate companies"? You seem to have misunderstood the difference between an advertising agency and a SEO company. What you're describing is what advertising agencies do, SEO companies are spammers that sell access to their spamming tools. It's similar to the difference between an agency practicing law and having them send a cease-and-desist, and buying a DDoS. Not that I'm particularly fond of any of that, though I have lawyers practicing in another area as customers.
- elorant 3y agoA plastic surgeon is a legitimate business. How on earth would a business like that promote its site and gain visitors? By paying exuberant fees on keyword auctions on AdWords? It's way more affordable to just pay a PR firm, or a SEO company to publish an advertorial on a news site. And no, not all companies that sell SEO are spammers. Grow up, please. Some of you guys need to get your heads out of your butts and realize how the real world works. It's not just black and white all the time.
- rustcleaner 3y ago>A plastic surgeon is a legitimate business. At this point, the argument has lost good faith. ADDENDUM: for comprehension, not plastic surgeons.
- layer8 3y agoYou refuse because visibility of an article shouldn’t be based on who can pay the most money to push its visibility.
- elorant 3y agoI suggest you read the following. Because it's pretty obvious that a lot of you guys live in some parallel universe where things are just black and white. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- layer8 3y agoI disagree about having PR other than on the entity’s own website, newsletters and such. There is nothing parallel-universe about that.
- dazc 3y agoYou should refuse for the simple fact that this company is unlikely to be only contacting you. They will have a large footprint that you don't want to be part of.
- stavros 3y agoI mean, if the only signal is from link farms, that's still pretty good correlation with crap content, just not the way Google thinks.
- IX-103 3y agoIt's not nofollow links. It's content behind a login wall. If the content can't be found with a crawler it might as well not exist. So sites like Facebook and Xitter that block a significant amount content for non-logged in users are the problem.