[rsync]

"You seem to have a lot of experience with this kind of stuff."

Which is sad.

SEO is a cancer and, like cancer, there is no good SEO. Google and their broken search ecosystem have spawned a vast, useless, derivative "industry" that needs to die.

I say "broken ecosystem" because SEO should have a value that is inverse to how well google indexes. That SEO exists at all shows the extent to which it is broken. Website death penalties (or whatever we call this) don't solve the problem.

[vidyesh]

You are somewhat right and somewhat wrong.

SEO indeed is like what you described, but there is a fine line to start doing blackhat or stay whitehat.

Now the problem is, the line is so thin you end up crossing it at times. And everybody does. The way Google works you need to do both somewhat in a way to get the balance and stay top.

For example, link-building its one of the worst areas where defining white-hat and black-hat is really difficult. One way is doing guest post is allowed and great but paid posts aren't. There is no guarantee a guest post is not a paid post.

There are 'digital marketing agencies' which at times are so ridiculous that the backlink included in the guest post doesn't have any value in to the post as such but anchor text magic does all the work.

SEO isn't broken as such but there are too many backdoors to doing the white-hat SEO methods in the concealed black-hat way that it isn't realistic to blame he search ecosystem.

I agree, website penalties is not a good solution to the problem.

[blauwbilgorgel]

There certainly is good SEO. Good SEO is often indistinguishable from good accessibility, good marketing, good design, good conversion optimization, good information theory, good metrics.

You use sites because they used good SEO. You can find StackOverflow posts ranking at one, because they used the good SEO that the good content deserved.

Anyone with an internet business taking your comment at face value will find herself ranking not in the top 20, no matter how good their content.

Good SEO has worth, has value. Even Matt Cutts promotes good SEO and sees the worth. Without SEO analytics you are sailing blind. Without knowledge of how to interpret them. Without knowledge of the guidelines you get gaffs like these.

There is good SEO and there is vandalization. Rap Genius vandalized their rankings.

No industry needs to die. If it needs to, explain why.

Optimize your site for all users, not just search engines.

If you stay in this naive view of SEO you will never have a successful internet business in many niches. What is sad is that some developers and designers can not deliver a website that is SEO optimized, so a business owner has to pay double to get an SEO to fix all on-page accessibility issues.

This penalty is entirely the result of that blogpost and the PR it generated. I am willing to bet that Google already discovered many of these links, through spam reports, through manual spam fighters and through algorithmic detection. This PR, and the open letter, forced Google's hand. Of course they have to visibly act on it. Of course they are well aware that that niche has some scummy shady practices, and Rap Genius is not the only one. Of course they have a better internal tool than OSE and can check link profiles and detect networks in a manner of minutes.

Besides, you can be a great SEO and never do a single link-building campaign. There is tremendous value in simply finding new content and articles to rank for and drive traffic. I loath black hat SEO, not for the unfair temporary advantage it gives, but because it creates posts like yours. Because it burns companies that are now much more careful to hire good SEO's. Because I know that good SEO helps people access relevant content.

Like e-mail spam, search engine spam will die. SEO's will be retrained to create websites that are accessible, user friendly, give content that is relevant to the search query.

Just read: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...

And try to find a single practice in there that is either manipulative, entirely done to service search engines alone, or hampers accessibility and user friendliness.

Good SEO builds authority. Creates quality mark-up. Makes descriptive website titles. Implements breadcrumbs and a sane website hierarchy. Rids the index of duplicates. Drives more users to your sites. Makes sure that blind people can access your content, like images or video. Makes sites load faster. Makes content more trustworthy etc. Good SEO needs no manipulation. There is a lot to gain by simply aligning yourself with Google's vision.

Please reconsider your tone, or realize you do not add anything of value to the debate, or to the many online business owners on HN. Can you imagine raising funds for an online startup and then have your post be the slide for "online marketing"?

[rsync]

"Anyone with an internet business taking your comment at face value will find herself ranking not in the top 20, no matter how good their content."

... which is a direct indictment of google and their (as you put it) ineffective search results. If the best content is not being served based on its merit, the search results are bad.

A very good explanation for this is that optimizing for good search results and optimizing for high ad clicks from searchers are two different things, and you can't do both. Therefore the price of optimizing for search-ad-revenue is less than optimal results and the unintended consequence is a side-game that parasites play called "SEO". I mean parasite in the nicest possible sense and I think it's an apt description.

"Please reconsider your tone, or realize you do not add anything of value to the debate, or to the many online business owners on HN."

I'm not here for the business owners - I came for the hackers.

[blauwbilgorgel]

>which is a direct indictment of google and their (as you put it) ineffective search results

I think Google has the best quality index of all search engines. There is a Kaggle challenge for Yandex right now where you can optimize the search results taking into account data like user sessions and dwell time. It's hard, but very cool. Google owns hard and cool stuff. Web spam is a multi-faceted and complex problem. But these guys are training neural networks on Youtube stills and make it detect cats. The last time I found a top 10 spam result that irked me was months ago. I filed a report and move on to the otherwise great index.

>If the best content is not being served based on its merit, the search results are bad.

If the best content is in an image without an alt attribute or longdesc or HTML fallback, on a page with no surrounding text, no sourcing, no pagetitle, no meta description. On a domain that accidentally blocks search engines with robots.txt, has no structural interlinking of pages, no backlinks, takes 50 seconds to load, redirects crawlers to a different page by IP, and only works with javascript on. If that happens to be the best content, then that is a shame. Google could probably still index it :). But the search results are better for not ranking that inaccessible, untrustworthy, undiscoverable piece of content very high. A store can sell the best goods, but if they put blinds in front of the window, do not promote or advertise, make customers crawl over obstacles to place their order, then such a store will simply not do very well.

>optimizing for good search results and optimizing for high ad clicks from searchers are two different things, and you can't do both.

Why not? Major sites both optimize organic results and their SEM. AirBnb could create content for each major city they host in and rank organically. They could advertise locally or very targeted to people interested in making use of their services and link to the actual property page or listings.

>I mean parasite in the nicest possible sense and I think it's an apt description. I'm not here for the business owners - I came for the hackers.

Google compresses nearly every information in the world to a single search query. That search box is the shortest program to expand to any related content that is currently found in the world. A giant information retrieval intelligence sends out its bots to crawl information every second and store it in global time consistent databases. From a black box algorithm with supposedly 200+ ranking factors, an SEO has to give each web page the optimal chance to rank for what its worth, by reading public documentation, experiment, analyze, track, predict, format HTML documents in an information retrieval friendly way, do split testing with contextual bandits or multivariate A/B, improve accessibility, improve the link graphs of the internet and semantic web with metadata. You come for the hackers, yet you treat SEO's and Google like script kiddies.