[jl6]

> Write good content

Then why do pages at the top of search results for everyday searches like recipes all have that godawful life-story blogspam structure?

Those sites are the polar opposite of “good content” and yet they hit the top rankings regardless.

Nobody writing in good faith sets out to write “content”. Anybody whose objective is “content” is not to be trusted.

No, the way to get top ranking is to throw your readers under the bus and recognize how this game works: your objective is to create a page that shoves as many adverts as you can in your reader’s face. Short content? Pad that shit out so you can fit more interstitials amongst its paragraphs. Google makes money off most of these adverts, so they are happy to reward such sites with high rankings. You’re happy. Google is happy. Who else matters?

[snowwrestler]

Wikipedia has fantastic SEO and no ads at all.

Recipe blogs all suck because it’s nearly impossible to make money just publishing recipes. So every single one has to do the worst stuff just to barely survive. Song lyrics are a similar area.

If you want to see a strong SEO play supporting a product, look up almost anything related to film production, like “line producer” or “second assistant director” or “call sheet.” I bet you find a studiobinder.com link in the top 5 results. They publish a ton of super helpful and easy to understand content about how movies get made. And they make money via sales so they have no ads in the content.

[rchaud]

> Nobody writing in good faith sets out to write “content”. Anybody whose objective is “content” is not to be trusted.

The article is an SEO guide for startups, not recipe blogs, which exist in a separate category of SEO gamification.

Startups usually get their SEO hits by writing detailed guides on something tangentially related to their product. For example, I will see posts from Lucidchart's website when I'm looking up "process mapping template". They've created a lengthy web page discussing different types of process mapping, and include downloadable templates.

I had never heard of Lucidchart before, they appear to be a competitor to MS Visio. I ended up signing up for an account, but ultimately felt it wasn't right. I wouldn't have signed up at all if I felt the article I discovered wasn't useful.

Of course you can choose not to bother with SEO at all and hope your website magically generates qualified leads.