[dalore]

SEO rigging? That's mostly having links from other reputable sources. If this software is good, other good sites will link to it rising it up in the search results.

Lot's of open source projects come up top of the results when you search for stuff because of this fact.

[cookiecaper]

>SEO rigging? That's mostly having links from other reputable sources. If this software is good, other good sites will link to it rising it up in the search results.

This is a myth perpetrated by Google and it's entirely false. The fact is that if you aren't actively engaged in spa--err, SEO--, you will be outgamed and crushed by anyone moderately competent at spa-- err, "internet marketing".

I make a point of replying to this because my established, objectively-superior-in-every-tangible-way company was creamed by a bad copycat that had a pre-existing spam apparatus, despite our one-year head start and, as already stated, every conceivable advantage (we were cheaper, more effective (their stuff basically didn't work at all), and much more attractive (they were using a crappy WordPress template; we had a beautiful custom design created by professional designers)).

I was dumb enough to believe Google's statement that if you're good, you'll gain organic links and your rank will rise. Our SEO strategy was based on writing a lot of blog posts and hoping their relevance and high-quality information would facilitate a rise in the ranks (our competitor had no content at all; just a landing page promoting his bad knockoff product). This strategy had basically no effect. Making good content and/or products and crossing your fingers simply does not work if you have commercial competitors.

>Lots of open source projects come up top of the results when you search for stuff because of this fact.

Technical projects that are either so ubiquitous it wouldn't make any sense for Google to display anything else, so niche that there is no real commercial competition targeting non-technical people, or both. As can be clearly seen with youtube-dl, if it's a keyword that other parties are interested in monetizing, you have to either play the game or lose. The game is not what Google or Matt Cutts say it is (that's disinformation), the game is what actually gets you to a high ranking on Google.

[CM30]

Did you actually approach the media, authorities in the niche, Techcrunch, etc?

Because you can't just rely on 'on site' SEO to succeed. Adding a bunch of content on your own site is good, but what's really needed is to get authorities elsewhere to link to it. So you need to get good at marketing/PR, in the sense of talking to people with popular sites and social media channels.

You can do a ton of stuff on your own site, but it's irrelevant if you're not being linked to or mentioned elsewhere. And one good link from say, the New York Times or BBC or some other popular site is worth a ton more than a thousand spam links from low quality domains.

[cookiecaper]

The niche was extremely specific. It's not something the NY Times or TechCrunch or other big generic media outlets would've reported on.

As for niche authorities, there are only a very small handful of them. I did contact them. One of them never replied and started deleting all references to my project off of their message boards where users had been raving about it. I don't have any official reason why, I can only speculate that they saw some sort of competitive threat in it, though it wasn't competing other than providing a service to the same small niche at the time.

Another niche authority I spoke with pretended that they were interested in running a story about me long enough to get into the beta and get a feel for how it worked, at which point they stopped replying to me, blocked me everywhere that has a block function, and tried to copy the idea themselves. Their copycat was so bad that it was shut down by their host for spam violations within a month. I tried to follow up after the fact here and never got a reply.

I got one or two sites to link to me as a paid sponsorship thing. I don't think they put nofollow on their links, but I'm sure their PageRank was pretty small anyway. My guess would be that most domains in the niche don't have a lot of influence with Google.

In a dysfunctional niche like the one I was involved in, where everyone is hyper-paranoid that any new person on the scene, even if they're not directly competing, could be their death, Google's link authority approach doesn't really work.

I made extensive use of social media through the advertising options on Facebook and Twitter. I also ran AdWords. The results from the first 2 were fine and the results from AdWords were below average. However, all that was proven to be useless when compared with an organized spam campaign, which I was intentionally trying not to run.

I've since accepted that you have to deploy some of these tactics that everyone complains about and pretends are so evil, whilst they do them behind their back. I wish I would've accepted that earlier instead of believing the bullshit that's put out about this.

[CM30]

Wow, that's pretty awful. Out of curiosity, what is this niche? Sounds like one where the major players in the field are messed up beyond belief.

Last time I heard stories like that was about heavily spammed niches, like casinos or pharmacies or SEO itself.

But yeah, if you're in a field where competitors are either ultra paranoid or sleazy, then you'll likely have to resort to 'dirty' tactics.

[cookiecaper]

I don't want to disclose the niche because it's so small that disclosing it will likely allow people to figure out what the project was. It's not something that's conventionally thought of as filled with spammers. I was pretty surprised at the total vacuum of professional behavior when I first got plugged into it.

The larger issue here is that Google's algorithms can't identify quality content without something that it already believes to be quality pointing out to it (and in a very specific way that Google detects as a "natural" link, whatever that means). This causes issues with innovative solutions that aren't immediately accepted within their niche, niches that are small and heavily paranoid, and in which incumbents maintain their positions by offensively seeking to harm and/or silence discussion of anyone they dislike, or other sites that deserve good rankings but are unable to get acclaim from either the NYT or the niche-equivalent. You shouldn't need an entity Google trusts to run a story on you to get good rankings. It'd be great if Google fixed that, but I don't really expect them to do so.

We should just make it known among real entrepreneurs that they shouldn't have reservations about SEO tactics (which are almost all somewhat uncomfortable, at least) and that they are required to compete so that no one else with a good, legit business gets quashed by a spammer because Matt Cutts and Google swears up and down that not only do you not need to do anything but "make good content", but that you'll be hurt if you take artificial steps to enhance your rank. It's BS -- those artificial steps are mandatory to control ranking.

[CM30]

Unfortunately, this is likely going to be a problem till strong AI becomes a thing, since there's no real way to judge content quality automatically without it.

Also, popularity may not be tied to quality, but to some degree, it's tied to what people expect to get when they search. Which is its own problem, since someone like Microsoft or Apple could do anything, yet people would be suspicious if they didn't show up for obvious queries. So it's a balancing act between 'rank the sites that might be better but less obscure', or 'rank the ones people expect to find because they already know about them'.

As for having reservations about SEO tactics... it should depend on exactly what they are. Something that hurts communities or users (like spamming forums or social media) is pretty damn sleazy, and is a quick way to commit business suicide. As is outright or borderline criminal behaviour for rankings.

[mootothemax]

>SEO rigging? That's mostly having links from other reputable sources. If this software is good, other good sites will link to it rising it up in the search results

You have tell Google what your site is about, otherwise it's pretty hopeless; you're pretty much well asking Google to guess what terms the site should rank for.

The five-minute-basics this site needs are to create a meaningful title tag (getting "YouTube Downloader" in there would be a great start. With zero research, maybe even "YouTube Downloader - Save Videos for Later"), create a friendly meta description that'll tell people what it's about in the search result pages, and use an H1 where it's currently using a TD with "subtitle" class.

It wouldn't hurt to also have a short bullet-point list of uses cases, just to get related search terms - e.g. "save youtube to my computer" - that the big G can use to direct users to the site.

>Lot's of open source projects come up top of the results when you search for stuff because of this fact.

The problem is so bad, I know lots of people - myself included - who hunt for projects first on Github, and Google a distant second.

Google is capable of some quite incredible things; using mind-reading to find out the important parts of a project or what it relates to, sadly, isn't one of their core strengths.

[dalore]

Google pretty much ignore or place a very very low value on meta description and titles since it's so easy to game. External links, from high ranking reputable sites is where the most value is at since they are hard to game.

Example would be linking to this project page from the wikipedia page for youtube. Also the text used for links is important.

Yes google is a mind reader and it does figure what your page is about. It's actually not that hard using natural language toolkits to process the text on the page and figure it out. See http://www.nltk.org/

[OJFord]

    > The problem is so bad, I know lots of people - myself
    > included - who hunt for projects first on Github, and
    > Google a distant second.

Seriously?

I search with `site:github.com` all the time.

[jefurii]

DuckDuckGo has !github, !gh, !ghcode, and !gist.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=github

[OJFord]

That just takes me to GH search results, though.

My point is I find that I have more success with Google's indexing than Github's own (same with SO; many others).

[TheGrassyKnoll]

And don't forget !yt for YouTube search from DuckDuckGo. (!bang will show you almost 8000 bang options)

[mootothemax]

>Seriously?

>I search with `site:github.com` all the time.

Yup - I find that Google's index isn't always as fresh as Github's, and being able to filter by code vs. repository vs. issues and then by language if necessary is a great help.

Basically, for me, finding open-source projects is a real unsolved problem!