[cj]

1) SEO works best when you create real content targeted at real users

2) SEO works best when its not your end goal

3) Google knows this and is smarter than your SEO agency. Ditch the agency and simply create legitimate content your users find valuable and google will rank it.

It might take more than 12 months for everything to rank and pay off. But that's life. Google Ads exists for people looking for immediate results.

[beefield]

That is a nice theory many (especially google) would like me to believe, but if that is the case, why majority of my google first page results can be classified as SEO spam?

[Cthulhu_]

Because Google earns more money off of those results than legitimate pages. That's what I think anyway. Some years ago they said they were going to crack down on SEO spam, content farms, even website popups like newsletter subscriptions, asking people to report them through a browser plugin.

But since then... nothing, and the content farms are prominent again. Google doesn't care because the competition isn't significantly better, and they don't actually care about the search results, they care about ad impressions which they will get regardless of how people end up on pages - or what pages for that matter.

[raesene9]

My own, quite limited, experiments with this kind of agree. On my personal blog I wrote a long series of posts on a specific topic (PCIs guidance for Kubernetes), and I was very interested to see if it reached the front page when up against older less specific content from large companies.

I know that this is an area where there will be SEO optimized content from vendors, so it was interesting to see how a purely organic not optimized set of blogs would do.

It took a while, but one or more of the articles (depending on the search engine and day) tends to pop up for searches for PCI Kubernetes.

[ricardo81]

Knowledge of 'technical SEO' is also beneficial. Using structured markup and using href-lang when the site spans multiple languages for example. The kind of things I'd guess are domain specific knowledge.

[jonwinstanley]

Yes. Shown clearly in their legitimate post about how they lost a lot of money paying for SEO

Maybe they’ll get a lead or two from being on the front page of hacker news? :-)

[blitzar]

> Google Ads exists for people looking for immediate results.

60k on ads would have been an interesting experiement.

[voytec]

4) never ignore HTML meta elements/tags[1] - the ancient, pre-"SEO" stuff

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1866#section-5.2.5