5 ms·

Ask HN: What's relevant to Google Search ranking anymore?

• bhartzer 12y ago
  Quit obsessing over Google rankings and worry more about getting traffic and eyeballs to your site. If you get the traffic and real visitors, then rankings will naturally follow. Stop thinking of yourself as a "small-time blogger" and think of yourself as a journalist, a reporter, someone who has a story to tell. Write content that people want to read. Uncover something that people care about. Write something controversial. Use 'social' to get people to see what you write. I've been in your shoes: I was a 'small-time blogger' and just kept uncovering stuff that people care about, articles that people want read, and after hundreds of posts I finally started getting traffic regularly. Then I uncovered something that lots of people cared about and that post of mine hit the home page of HN and Reddit all at the same time. I didn't think my server could keep up with all the traffic. Sure, make sure your site is "optimized" based on SEO best practices. But don't obsess over rankings.
  • antjanus 12y ago
    Right. So I understand that an organic-only strategy will yield little to no results especially nowadays; however, it is still a major way people access content. That's what I was wondering about. Otherwise, I get a nice amount of traffic from various sources (people that linked to my site, social media, HN, and Reddit) but those sources aren't "long-term" like organic traffic is. (you hit top once and then you're gone the next day so to speak).
• hagbardgroup 12y ago
  At the same time that Google is cracking down on a lot of old black hat methods (which is good, because it was unpleasant when they worked), other content discovery methods besides search are popping up. There are now many services that exist just to advertise content: Taboola, Outbrain, Stumbleupon's ad product, CoPromote, and more. You can build a following over Wordpress or Tumblr. The rates are lower than conventional PPC and display because the ad networks who offer it regulate what can be promoted. Other opportunities include syndicating your content on popular sites, which, if you follow Google's guidelines, can be great for improving search ranking. It has always costed something to rank. Ranking on Google for a valuable term is now more expensive than ever. If your budget doesn't allow you to rank for your target terms, there are lower cost options to build qualified traffic. You can use those lower cost options to build up your site quality and authority to the point to which you can compete.
  • antjanus 12y ago
    Interesting but that seems to rely on advertising as a means of distributing content. And what do you mean "syndicating your content"? I've actually not heard of doing this.
    • hagbardgroup 12y ago
      Syndication is an old term that just means running the same article in multiple outlets. For example, George Will's column is syndicated across a ton of different newspapers. The National Board of Realtors syndicates content through hundreds of local publications by providing articles for free. For SEO purposes it's a little different and not always easy to manage. This is a good article that I've found that talks about some of the practical issues that can pop up: http://smepals.com/small-business-seo/how-content-syndication-can-be-devastating-small-business-seo-and-website-traffic http://smepals.com/small-business-seo/how-content-syndicatio...? Yeah, title is a little negative, but it's still got some useful details on how to manage it intelligently. Not everyone who will syndicate or scrape your stuff will be willing to follow the rules. A lot of people will not even understand what you're asking them to do, so you'll have to spell it out for them as didactically as possible. If you can get them to follow the rules, it can be an effective way to 'borrow' the traffic and link equity for a certain page or post. More on rel=canonical from Google: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-... And a Moz discussion: http://moz.com/community/q/syndication-link-back-vs-rel-canonical http://moz.com/community/q/syndication-link-back-vs-rel-cano...
      • antjanus 12y ago
        Right, I had a negative connection with that term since, basically, Google sees original content or nothing. Thanks for the tip!
• petercooper 12y ago
  Getting mentions (especially popular ones or those from popular users) on Twitter appears to be having quite an impact nowadays. Ditto for Google+. It makes sense though since legit people only share legitimately good/interesting stuff on these networks, so make stuff that's worth sharing and get it out there.
  • lauradhamilton 12y ago
    How do you distinguish cause and effect though?
  • antjanus 12y ago
    So getting social media followers?
    • hlmencken 12y ago
      or just links to the site
• andymurd 12y ago
  You still need links to rank, just like the old days. However, unlike the old days, you need links from (very) high quality, high relevance sites. Commenting won't cut it, blogrolls won't cut it, site-wide footer links (e.g. "Wordpress Theme by MyBlog.com") won't cut it. You need someone that writes regularly for a premier or second tier site to create an editorial link to your post with relevant anchor text. It's hard to get those authors to notice you - really hard - but it does happen. Keep writing good quality content and engage the right people often. Do something nice for them, offer a free tool that's perfect for their niche or help them out with technical stuff. Be a good guy - good guys get good links, given enough time. When you have a few high authority links into your pages, you can link to yourself and distribute that page rank around your site. And when your site moves up the rankings, don't forget to link out to the other struggling good guys out there.
• NewsReader42 12y ago
  The other main trouble is that if one of these large sites scrapes your OWN unique content (lets say a blog post) and has it on their site Google will treat the larger site as the OWNER of that content due to it's higher rank / reputation leaving your OWN site getting penalised (or at least not ranked) for DUPE content - this is something that needs fixing
  • antjanus 12y ago
    Urgh, that's my biggest pet peeve.
  • lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    It's easily fixBle - add rel="canonical" to the page and ensure you are linked to google plus as the sites author (google authorship) it's not too hard but essentially google wants to verify your g+ account against your site - then if your text appears on your site it's your original work.