[graeme]

There are plenty of other use cases. Tech is a bit unusual in that:

  * People stay in it permanently
  * People link to others freely
  * People have many non-commercial posts

Many other niches are temporary. For example, I work in LSAT prep. The LSAT is an exam north Americans have to take before entering law school. For 3-6 months, people are extremely interested in the LSAT, then they forget about it. There is a constant stream of entrants searching for information. Informational articles and search traffic is essential.

Similar cases:

  * Making a will
  * Selling a house
  * Writing a resume

I'll give one personal example. Recently, I wanted to read a King James Version of the Bible, for literary reasons. But it's hard to find a readable bible.

So I searched, and quickly found many articles by a site called Bible Design Blog. It's an incredible resource for bible printing and typography. I learned what I needed and got a bible.

And now I don't care about bible design, so I don't go to the site. I imagine he gets many similar visitors from organic traffic.

[jacquesm]

So you as a user were well served in your searches. That's the bit that google cares about most I would assume. Whether or not you went to 'bible design blog', 'design bible blog', 'bible typography.info' and whoever else they compete with (I just made those up) is of secondary importance.

The problem sits there where you would not find good content to serve your needs. And if you feel that this update impacts that goal in a negative way then I think there is a good case to be made for this being a net negative. I see no evidence of that for now though.

[graeme]

Well, maybe. If someone destroyed bible design blog's ranking, then I wouldn't have known I missed a superior option. I would have found stuff, but no competitors were as good.

The main incentive for negative SEO would be to let inferior content win, no?

I do agree in general that google works extraordinarily well for the user in most cases. Your point is clearer now.

[jacquesm]

> If someone destroyed bible design blog's ranking, then I wouldn't have known I missed a superior option. I would have found stuff, but no competitors were as good.

For all you know a superior option existed but you don't know about it because 'bible design blog's SEO guy torpedoed them. I know that's reaching, especially given the subject matter but you get the point.

> The main incentive for negative SEO would be to let inferior content win, no?

I'm sure the SEO proponents would claim the exact opposite. We trust in Google to do the right thing here and I'm all for letting it be that way, but google is under no obligation to actually let the best content win. We hope they do, and we assume that our goals are aligned in this respect but frankly I have no idea how for the top 1,000,000 searches the actually achieved precision is. I would expect it to be quite high, but I have absolutely no way of verifying that and for all I know the results are junk. We will only know that that was the case when something better comes along and finds/ranks the content much better than Google does now. Comparing to Bing Google is doing ok, comparing to DDG is not fair given the relative sizes.

But I'd be one very happy person if a new search engine appeared that would give me exactly one page of results with all of them super relevant, even if it indexed only 10% of the web I would probably use it with some regularity. Quality is far more important than quantity.

FWIW I actually built a small search engine along those lines about 7 years ago, I never launched it because I simply don't have the resources to undertake such a project but I learned a ton about how hard the problem is that google tries to solve and even though I'm 100% at odds with them on the joint subjects of privacy and the way google+ gets rammed down my throat I do appreciate the difficulty of their position and the technical challenges involved in operating a search engine at this scale.