7 ms·

Why does it matter so much? That's a blog, and a non-commercial one at that. Why do you care so much what your 'link profile' is? Well, besides the fact that i

Why does it matter so much? That's a blog, and a non-commercial one at that. Why do you care so much what your 'link profile' is? Well, besides the fact that it's his prerogative to care about his blog's search ranking, I think the implications are pretty obvious; he's suggesting that if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone, including someone who does have a commercial interest.

jacquesm 12y ago
I miss the bit where we have a right to traffic. That's maybe naive, but just like I don't expect customers to beat their way to my door through some act of magic I don't expect visitors to come to my website either. If I want them there I have to go and engage them. That's marketing, building customer relationships and so on. Hard work, and definitely not easy money but it is very hard to assail that from the position of a competitor or even Google. Of course it could happen to anybody. That is the one reason why you should never ever run a business that is dependent on a single source for customers. If you do that you don't have a business at all, just an extension of the ecosystem owned by someone else at whose whim you live or die.
- vectorpush 12y ago
  I get what you're saying, but as far as business goes, it's just not very pragmatic to ignore the monumental impact that google can have on your hits/conversions. Your competitors certainly aren't ignoring it.
- jshen 12y ago
  I'm really shocked by your naive arrogance in this thread. You can't see beyond your own niche and use case. There is an enormous space of good content where the best method of finding that content is searching the internet, not having a previous relationship with a client/customer. In an earlier comment I gave one of many examples, medical conditions that people don't care about until they get it, and at that point they turn to google to search for information. Google is effectively a monopoly on this front, and at some level should have an obligation to the common good.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    The problem here is not that 'good content' is not going to be found, it seems to be that in spaces where there is a ton of competition that the competitors are all in some kind of state where they all feel they and they alone have a right to be the ones to engage with the searchers on topic 'x'. I highly doubt that in the use-case that you envision (which is indeed not one that I had in mind when reading the comment above) where you are providing to the point information about something you care about you'll find that your information gets drowned out by content that has been SEO'd to the hilt. But even if that were the case I'd blame the SEO guys, not the search engine. Remember how altavista was spammed to death with on-page trickery and google came and it all suddenly was much better. At the time we did not realize that this would come at the price of the destruction of what made the web great, the links that would lead you from one place to another. The fact that google is a monopoly is our collective problem, not google's, it's only a monopoly because we let them and because - for now - they are still the best way to get to relevant content. The thing that could happen in your use-case is that someone would end up finding their information somewhere else or that they would engage with someone else. The only case where there would be a loss to them (your hypothetical visitor) is if they would not engage with anybody at all. But that can't really be true since we're theorizing here from the point of view where there is a glut of relevant content competing for a limited number of slots and then regardless of what the criteria are some of those sites will simply miss out on potential visitors. The only real worry I have here is that the users would not find any relevant content or places to engage at all. And that's far from being proven. Google does not have an obligation to the common good other than an ethical and a moral one, a real obligation is a legal one and I - in spite of being fairly harshly critical of google on lots of fronts - have no doubt that if they could solve the spam problem in an effective way would not need any prodding at all to go and do that immediately. Demanding they do better is tantamount to dictating that an advance in technology be made, maybe the problem is harder than it seems?
    - jshen 12y ago
      "you'll find that your information gets drowned out by content that has been SEO'd to the hilt. But even if that were the case I'd blame the SEO guys, not the search engine." Maybe, but the part that bothers me is that if you listen to Matt Cutt's he basically says that you should make good content, make a good user experience, build a relationship with your audience, and not think about SEO explicitly. This isn't true for large swathes of content types. "The fact that google is a monopoly is our collective problem, not google's, it's only a monopoly because we let them" This is like saying that we don't need antitrust laws because it's our own fault if we allow them to become a monopoly or get into some other situation where fair competition isn't possible. "The thing that could happen in your use-case is that someone would end up finding their information somewhere else or that they would engage with someone else. The only case where there would be a loss to them (your hypothetical visitor) is if they would not engage with anybody at all" No, there is a loss if the only content they find at the top of google is demand media style content with no good information but that is SEO'd to the hilt, and people with good and real content can't outrank them. "Demanding they do better is tantamount to dictating that an advance in technology be made, maybe the problem is harder than it seems?" I mostly agree, but I think this is a bit too simplistic. I worked on search engines for years and fully understand how hard this problem is. I don't know the answer to this problem, but I see a clear problem or problems. One of which is Google's PR which says "hey, just make a good site with good content and the rest will take care of itself". They aren't really being honest here. For years they dodged the question of negative SEO.
- ameister14 12y ago
  I disagree with your second statement. If I run a gas station along a heavily trafficked street, is that a mistake? I have one source of customer; people aren't going to be loyal to my services enough to drive for them. If the traffic on the street lessens, I can lose business. It doesn't mean it's a bad idea to buy or build the gas station there.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Yes, if the traffic on the street lessens then you will lose (some) business. But where is the unfairness in that? You don't actually have a right to business. And if people are not loyal that's a serious problem with either the line of business you are in or your relationship with your customer.
    - ameister14 12y ago
      I'm not saying it's unfair. I'm saying you can enter into a business where you have a competitive advantage based on location and run said business profitably, and that's not a mistake. If it didn't work, we would have no gas stations. I don't know about you, but I'm not so loyal to a particular gas station that I would drive farther to reach it if there were others more convenient to me that offered the same service for the same price. That doesn't mean it's a bad business. It means there is competition with fairly exact substitutes, and location is a big part of success.
- chrismcb 12y ago
  It isn't just about the web site owner and their traffic... It is also about you. Don't you want Google to give you good results? Wouldn't you be unhappy if the best result got hidden on page 50 because someone link spammed them?
antjanus 12y ago
That's one thing another thing is that just because my blog is non-commercial doesn't mean it shouldn't rank. I monetized it recently and would like to continue making some cash off it (to cover costs and as an incentive and excuse to continue doing this). On top of that, I like to write, the more people read my shit, the more I'm excited to write. What sucks about this entire dilemma is that we're all looking at "lost revenue", no one is looking at "quality content going down the drain". Good search results disappear and are replaced by someone who has a ton of cash backing them whose content is meant to convert and monetize, make cash off the user and nothing else. At least in my case, I want people to primarily read my stuff. And it seems ridiculous to me that someone would say, "Who cares if people read your blog, it's not as if you're making any money off it!" Can you imagine some of the most popular devs that have non-monetized blogs all of a sudden disappearing from google search with their insights and answers? Among others, there's Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman both of whom rank well but have non-monetized sites.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Forgive me for being stupid, but what does google have to do with all this? It's the last source of traffic that I would think of when it comes to blogging, I could be completely wrong about this but I can't imagine that's the way to to it. What would do it is: interesting articles, a userbase that likes what you write and passes it to their friends, a reputation for quality and useful articles, people linking to you because they found your content useful, engaging you audience and so on. In contrast with that (which takes a long time to build up, that I will readily admit) google traffic seems so fickle.
  - moistgorilla 12y ago
    When I search for an article on some new tech or a tutorial for some library or such I almost always get a few blogs with good content. Many of those blogs have books written by the owners which they advertise on the subject they blog about. I buy those sometimes. Basically, google is a good source of traffic for blogs.
  - tobltobs 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago

I miss the bit where we have a right to traffic. That's maybe naive, but just like I don't expect customers to beat their way to my door through some act of magic I don't expect visitors to come to my website either. If I want them there I have to go and engage them. That's marketing, building customer relationships and so on. Hard work, and definitely not easy money but it is very hard to assail that from the position of a competitor or even Google. Of course it could happen to anybody. That is the one reason why you should never ever run a business that is dependent on a single source for customers. If you do that you don't have a business at all, just an extension of the ecosystem owned by someone else at whose whim you live or die.

vectorpush 12y ago
I get what you're saying, but as far as business goes, it's just not very pragmatic to ignore the monumental impact that google can have on your hits/conversions. Your competitors certainly aren't ignoring it.
jshen 12y ago
I'm really shocked by your naive arrogance in this thread. You can't see beyond your own niche and use case. There is an enormous space of good content where the best method of finding that content is searching the internet, not having a previous relationship with a client/customer. In an earlier comment I gave one of many examples, medical conditions that people don't care about until they get it, and at that point they turn to google to search for information. Google is effectively a monopoly on this front, and at some level should have an obligation to the common good.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  The problem here is not that 'good content' is not going to be found, it seems to be that in spaces where there is a ton of competition that the competitors are all in some kind of state where they all feel they and they alone have a right to be the ones to engage with the searchers on topic 'x'. I highly doubt that in the use-case that you envision (which is indeed not one that I had in mind when reading the comment above) where you are providing to the point information about something you care about you'll find that your information gets drowned out by content that has been SEO'd to the hilt. But even if that were the case I'd blame the SEO guys, not the search engine. Remember how altavista was spammed to death with on-page trickery and google came and it all suddenly was much better. At the time we did not realize that this would come at the price of the destruction of what made the web great, the links that would lead you from one place to another. The fact that google is a monopoly is our collective problem, not google's, it's only a monopoly because we let them and because - for now - they are still the best way to get to relevant content. The thing that could happen in your use-case is that someone would end up finding their information somewhere else or that they would engage with someone else. The only case where there would be a loss to them (your hypothetical visitor) is if they would not engage with anybody at all. But that can't really be true since we're theorizing here from the point of view where there is a glut of relevant content competing for a limited number of slots and then regardless of what the criteria are some of those sites will simply miss out on potential visitors. The only real worry I have here is that the users would not find any relevant content or places to engage at all. And that's far from being proven. Google does not have an obligation to the common good other than an ethical and a moral one, a real obligation is a legal one and I - in spite of being fairly harshly critical of google on lots of fronts - have no doubt that if they could solve the spam problem in an effective way would not need any prodding at all to go and do that immediately. Demanding they do better is tantamount to dictating that an advance in technology be made, maybe the problem is harder than it seems?
  - jshen 12y ago
    "you'll find that your information gets drowned out by content that has been SEO'd to the hilt. But even if that were the case I'd blame the SEO guys, not the search engine." Maybe, but the part that bothers me is that if you listen to Matt Cutt's he basically says that you should make good content, make a good user experience, build a relationship with your audience, and not think about SEO explicitly. This isn't true for large swathes of content types. "The fact that google is a monopoly is our collective problem, not google's, it's only a monopoly because we let them" This is like saying that we don't need antitrust laws because it's our own fault if we allow them to become a monopoly or get into some other situation where fair competition isn't possible. "The thing that could happen in your use-case is that someone would end up finding their information somewhere else or that they would engage with someone else. The only case where there would be a loss to them (your hypothetical visitor) is if they would not engage with anybody at all" No, there is a loss if the only content they find at the top of google is demand media style content with no good information but that is SEO'd to the hilt, and people with good and real content can't outrank them. "Demanding they do better is tantamount to dictating that an advance in technology be made, maybe the problem is harder than it seems?" I mostly agree, but I think this is a bit too simplistic. I worked on search engines for years and fully understand how hard this problem is. I don't know the answer to this problem, but I see a clear problem or problems. One of which is Google's PR which says "hey, just make a good site with good content and the rest will take care of itself". They aren't really being honest here. For years they dodged the question of negative SEO.
ameister14 12y ago
I disagree with your second statement. If I run a gas station along a heavily trafficked street, is that a mistake? I have one source of customer; people aren't going to be loyal to my services enough to drive for them. If the traffic on the street lessens, I can lose business. It doesn't mean it's a bad idea to buy or build the gas station there.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Yes, if the traffic on the street lessens then you will lose (some) business. But where is the unfairness in that? You don't actually have a right to business. And if people are not loyal that's a serious problem with either the line of business you are in or your relationship with your customer.
  - ameister14 12y ago
    I'm not saying it's unfair. I'm saying you can enter into a business where you have a competitive advantage based on location and run said business profitably, and that's not a mistake. If it didn't work, we would have no gas stations. I don't know about you, but I'm not so loyal to a particular gas station that I would drive farther to reach it if there were others more convenient to me that offered the same service for the same price. That doesn't mean it's a bad business. It means there is competition with fairly exact substitutes, and location is a big part of success.
chrismcb 12y ago
It isn't just about the web site owner and their traffic... It is also about you. Don't you want Google to give you good results? Wouldn't you be unhappy if the best result got hidden on page 50 because someone link spammed them?

antjanus 12y ago

That's one thing another thing is that just because my blog is non-commercial doesn't mean it shouldn't rank. I monetized it recently and would like to continue making some cash off it (to cover costs and as an incentive and excuse to continue doing this). On top of that, I like to write, the more people read my shit, the more I'm excited to write. What sucks about this entire dilemma is that we're all looking at "lost revenue", no one is looking at "quality content going down the drain". Good search results disappear and are replaced by someone who has a ton of cash backing them whose content is meant to convert and monetize, make cash off the user and nothing else. At least in my case, I want people to primarily read my stuff. And it seems ridiculous to me that someone would say, "Who cares if people read your blog, it's not as if you're making any money off it!" Can you imagine some of the most popular devs that have non-monetized blogs all of a sudden disappearing from google search with their insights and answers? Among others, there's Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman both of whom rank well but have non-monetized sites.

jacquesm 12y ago
Forgive me for being stupid, but what does google have to do with all this? It's the last source of traffic that I would think of when it comes to blogging, I could be completely wrong about this but I can't imagine that's the way to to it. What would do it is: interesting articles, a userbase that likes what you write and passes it to their friends, a reputation for quality and useful articles, people linking to you because they found your content useful, engaging you audience and so on. In contrast with that (which takes a long time to build up, that I will readily admit) google traffic seems so fickle.
- moistgorilla 12y ago
  When I search for an article on some new tech or a tutorial for some library or such I almost always get a few blogs with good content. Many of those blogs have books written by the owners which they advertise on the subject they blog about. I buy those sometimes. Basically, google is a good source of traffic for blogs.
- tobltobs 12y ago