> compared to what the author actually recommends in the article (spamming).
Did you actually read the article?
SEO won't get you customers. Selling will.
He's saying, sell manually at first so that you can get to know your customer (and also see if your product is valuable). I.e. put in the time. This is universal sales 101.
Spending time getting HN frontpage or months on SEO won't get you any customers.
You can afford to do that if the website is not your primary source of income , not everyone has that luxury.
Online small and medium biz have to pay for their expenses , it is not for ad driven models either , organic traffic is significant source for people to purchase of your site. if your content is invisible to google for most sites that is a killing blow .
>So you would expect at least some market for high-end content creation, but nothing like that actually exists.
There is. It mostly exists in the form of subscription newsletters and paid research reports of various types. Specific examples include subscriptions to IT industry analysts such as Gartner. (Typically subscriptions include personalized services in addition to reports.)
In general, this has become a much tougher gig outside of a handful of large firms--because of all the competition with free content.
> In my opinion, the solution lies in better content curation tools. None of this would be a problem if search engines surfaced quality content once in a while.
Agreed!
Unsurprisingly, search engines funded by advertisers surface content which is effective at serving ads, rather than quality content. Do you see how this might be a problem?
> Affiliate marketing is a deal with the devil, but it's still a deal worth making. They let me work full time on building a useful resource and offering it for free. I can work with dignity, without having to beg for money, and still without selling out.
> 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.
> Time is this really scarce thing that technically apt people often have a limited supply of. He can spend days rolling his own blog app from his own super custom optimized framework and then do all the additional work of getting that content indexed on Google and sprinkle SEO black magic all over it, or he can just put up a blog post on a service where somebody else does all of that for him.
Or use one of the existing Google portals they use for sharing content about their products, research, technical findings...
> I get all these developer-focused, SEO-optimized blogs that are kind of helpful but often not, and I have to scroll all the way down to get the official docs. I really wonder if that has to do with AI-generated content becoming more ubiquitous
No. There's a cottage industry of content writers that just churn out this stuff by the bucket.
I have tried to hire writers in the past that should've been niche experts but just regurgitated content like this, and had SEO experts trying to convince me that we should actually aim for low quality because higher-quality articles will be too dense for people. (both contractors got the boot and the "content" went into the bin)
I think you hit the nail on the head with this observation:
> Instead, what we have is a culture of very shallow and information-light “articles”, that seems to me more like SEO bot posts trolling for clicks, rather than written for developers, by developers.
For a while now, content's been created as a means to improve SEO, and it's really obvious when an article was written just so it contains the right mashup of keywords and that it's padded to just the right length.
>Hmm, if they're not paying him, why does he just put links to these articles on his own blog (ideas.4brad.com), instead of copying the whole article?
Probably because of some combination of his deal with Forbes doesn't allow him to do so and it's often better to have a post/article in one place where it gets the most traffic. (There are other reasons why you might post in multiple places if you can, but SEO is probably not one of them.)
> Also the article is only accessible through a subscription, so I couldn't finish it, which is ironic because this is exactly what's broken with today's web.
> This is about me as the customer, not about you and your monthly .
Business want to retain customers and have repeat customers, not necessarily just active user numbers.
> We don’t create content for the web and for longevity. We create content to show ads around it.
Not just ads, but regarding social, what is more valuable to people, a library or a mechanism to get attention and influence from people?
The broader "rat race" here is how people must earn a living in todays's society
> I didn’t have to wait for a certain time to learn about a new movie – I could read up on it any time I wanted.
Who created that content and if it was from a professional source, did you benefit from it?
"information wants to be free" sure sounds great if you're not the one supplying it.
It doesnt sound like the author was a contributor to the free and open web. I'd be interested to hear a perspective from one of the bloggers he referenced who tirelessly produced content and who's blog died in 2010 with nothing to show for it.
> Content is, as always, still king. It doesn't matter how technically OK your site is, if the content isn't up to snuff, it won't do you much good.
Shameless plug: friends of mine have been building Webtexttool [1], a tool aimed at helping content writers (who often are unaware of SEO technicalities) write optimized content. They are still adding features but it already works quite well.
> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now.
People can still do that, and many still do. Possibly more do now than back then, in absolute numbers. The problem is search and discoverability, because of all the other, ad-driven content, and ad-driven search. More people would choose to not publish on ad-driven platforms if the alternatives (e.g. personal websites) would get them the same or better reach.
If you have to hire and manage a team of content writers it's not that free.
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