If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing culture. Less and less people browse search results and when they do it's more often to glance at the rank-0 result or click an ad. In general SEO being a zero-sum winner-take-all game makes me reluctant to even play when there are alternatives.
The new SEO is optimizing social media. Your visitors and customers are out there, you can talk to them, they can talk to you. You either create a following or pay an influencer to rent their following. In a way this is like going back to the old days of promotion and marketing where you'd go door-to-door to sell. Nowadays the web is saturated and filled with so many scams that word-of-mouth and being associated with a trustworthy face has become important once again.
This isn't accurate for a few different reasons...
1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea.
2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does.
3. SEO is not a zero sum game. Just because only one person can take the top spot for a grail keyword, that does not mean longer tailed variants or answer box results are not still valuable at driving tons of relevant traffic.
I'd suggest you take a step back and think more about what users coming to your site, or any site, would need to build trust in a brand instead of telling people to optimize their social media accounts. Followers are a vanity metric. High intent organic traffic is much more effective in the long run at communicating who you are and why someone should trust in your brand.
I don't think that's true. The reason SEO is hurting is because google is trying to increase their revenue by increasing the space that ads and their own widgets take up. SEO, Social (both micro and macro), Email, Paid Ads are all different viable types of marketing. The best strategy is to find a good balance of multiple items. You can build a large company on SEO alone. You can build a large company on social. The best companies seem to be the ones in multiple channels. The only long term sales channel that really matters at all is word of mouth. Customers directly getting other customers for you. Every other channel is hyper competitive.
There's plenty of legitimate SEO that does work. Figure out what your audience is struggling with, and publish articles explaining how your product solves that.
There are multi-million dollar businesses that run entirely on content + SEO (eg https://sleepopolis.com/).
Yes, you are taking on a big platform risk in that your business depends on Google continuing to serve you high amounts of traffic. Does that mean "you will go extinct one way or another", heck no.
Risk management is a big part of building a business. Just because there's a low chance that you could lose a significant chunk of your revenue overnight doesn't mean the business isn't worth starting.
Every company has risk (AWS, Stripe, npm, etc, etc, etc).
SEO itself is a garbage industry full of pseudoscience and snake oil quackery but the fundamental process of optimizing your web presence is something that isn't going away.
Social media is not a replacement for a great web presence.
Exactly. The web of yesteryear where you could make a living one-manning a website is practically gone. If you told me 20 years ago that I'd pine for the days of blogs, I'd have laughed. Now who's laughing...
If people look for a solution to a problem, SEO is still the number one for marketing strategies. It’s a lot less effective if you just sell another brand of a consumer good item such as coffee or whatever.
I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content.
This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content.
Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing.
As long as links are the main proxy for curation and the average Joe just has a social media account I believe algorithms will continue to silence minority opinions.
A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.
There was a huge shift in the mindset of the average webmaster between 2006 and 2012 that preceded the legendary "Penguin" and "Panda" updates.
Running a website went from being a funky, cool thing to do if you were passionate about tech to something you did because you wanted to build a business.
Somewhere in there, people got privy to the value of links (blog comment spam was insane) and people suddenly got a lot more stingy about their links.
This coincided with a massive groundswell of people looking to build "personal brands" in all sorts of spaces and a huge rise in info products by relative experts instead of absolute experts.
Today the absolute experts (or people who are a few steps past a relative experts) are completely drowned out because of their lack of links, lack of domain history/authority, and the general noisiness of the web.
Weird to look back at this because I wasn't innocent in all of this either.
- I was one of those people who built a personal brand, had 10k people on my email list, and was going to sell an info product.
- I was one of those SEOs who built huge sites and ranked for all sorts of things simply because I had a stronger domain and knew I could push the smaller guys out.
- I was one of those guys who stopped linking.
- I was one of the people who caused this change...
- How can I be one of the people who undoes it?
---
The Mozilla news really has me shaken up about the future of the web.
We the people of hacker news are the people who have the power and skills to directly and indirectly shape the future of the internet. What are we going to do with them?
> A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.
Hey, I am working on basically this. E.g.: https://findka.com/u/jobryant (warning, takes ~10 seconds to load fully). You make a profile, add your top article/book/movie/music/etc recommendations, then you get (1) a feed of recommendations from people you follow, (2) an Explore page that gives you algorithmic recommendations (collaborative filtering, currently via an off-the-shelf SVD library).
Right now the curation is a little basic, but today I'm adding filter controls to profiles so you can see a person's recommendations for a specific content type. Eventually, I'd also like to add custom tags so you can have recommendation/awesome lists for anything.
> [..] I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content.
This. Not only for SEO but in general I'd love to see the sources to stuff I read, especially in news articles, which often do not link to anything. It would also be great for content discovery as a reader.
> struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing.
If I had to make a really uninformed guess, the problem isn't identifying junk, but identifying what can be classified as junk without hurting their bottom line.
Because it's really easy as a user. Ratio of ads (or unrelated data) to content.
Anecdotal, but I run a small business of fairly niche B2B software. Around the end of April/beginning of May our traffic took a nosedive and has been slowly declining ever since (about 33% down now). I kinda got paranoid, so I used the Google Trends and Webmaster tools to decompose and quantify what is going on.
Well, it turns out, the ranking of our site in most major queries hasn't changed. People are genuinely searching less for serious topics. There is definitely an economic slowdown, it just takes a long time to start affecting regular software jobs.
P.S. Ironically, a rather silly side project of mine, that is related to old computer games, had a surge of traffic at the same time. It's like the "work from home" people decided they are better off replaying that classic game or two since the boss isn't watching.
This botnet contains thousands of sites (so far I found this botnet includes 9000+ domains). The same botnet that's attacking my sites and thousands of others companies.
It may well be this is a foreign state cyber attack: so many sites are target and the 9000+ botnet domains to pay aren't free. No doubt this is costing governments lots of money.
When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging income. Sad but true.
Quality or best results is not the ranking factor anymore, it's large botnets that decide on the Google ranking.
Try Google disavow tool, it barely works, but at least it's something. I hope someday Google will fix this (ignore negative SEO), but for now this is the way things are.
"Google Webmasters
@googlewmc
·
Aug 11
On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated.
Thank you for your patience!"
> With apologies, I have taken this post down: it has attracted a lot more attention than I expected, and I need to reconsider what I want to say on this topic.
They got spooked that Google will finish the job out of spite now that the post is getting so much attention. The focus shifted to fear of losing what's remaining (they mentioned it's still just barely paying the bills).
I don't get how companies can blame Google for loss of traffic. Google is going to do what it thinks will produce the best results.
And if you somehow think that gives you a right to show up in those results or be there if you benefited from showing up in results in the past, that's flawed thinking.
Web content makers have to realize their days of monetizing are numbered. Free web content is free food for NLP algorithms , which have already become impressive. In one of the next Google updates, they will eliminate web results compeltely and just give you the predicted answers. We're bound to see original content trying to hide themselves from google in order to remain relevant.
It's as if the author writes content to /please/ Google. There are other players in town that will spread my message wide, other than Google. Google is a single point of failure too. If most of your traffic relies on a black-box algo developed by Google, at some stage you are going to be butthurt by that algo. Others will celebrate their success at gaming Google's algo and getting good rankings consistently, but these people are mostly blackhat SEOs probably trying to peddle cialis with a cheap discount.
It seems pretty clear to me why you lost traffic here...
Your content isn't organized. I get to the site and I have no idea what to click on or how to find something that actually applies to me as someone looking for pain advice.
You have way too many internal links on these pages. Focus.
The content is all a wall of text with unclear headlines and sections that break up the content.
When you compare this to another site like healthline.com or draxe.com you can see the disparity.
Seems like you have done nothing to optimize the mobile experience, which is where id assume most traffic comes from seeing as they recently searched to a mobile first index.
Last but not least - what is 'Pains' and why is it the first link in the nav?
The bit soliciting people to link to the site is not only desperate SEO -- the author claims they're moving away from relying upon Google, when actually they're trying to double down, seriously asking for "high-quality, earnest links from highly ranked domains" -- it will yield very close to zero natural click through.
People are fairly impatient and when searching for something often hope for an answer as quickly as possible. This site seems heavily narrative based, with a number of paragraphs of content per point. I imagine that the median dwell time on the site is poor as a lot of people hit the back button to the SERP and just go to another page that cuts to the chase. Like the Physioplus page that this author mocks, which seems much clearer and succint.
We know that Google is constantly measuring and judging based upon that -- dwell time is king, and while SEO and desperate link solicitations might get you in contention, if the dwell time isn't there you will rightly get punted from the results. I doubt many care whether alternatives were written by a "high school dropout" if they get to the core of their need, which is usually developing the proper heuristics to know what they're dealing with.
Years ago a Google engineer on HN infamously said something to the effect of "Google considers SEO / free traffic a BUG" - somebody have that link handy?
Of course Google considers SEO a bug. The entire point of SEO is tricking google into thinking a page should be the top result. Google's goal isn't to always show the page with the best SEO, it's to show the page the searcher is searching for. Google has been in a continuous battle to stop SEO since it's inception.
"partly my fault for building my business around organic search and failing to diversify over the years"
Build real businesses, solve real business problems and stop depending on search engine SEO niche sites. One way or another either the competition eats you and write all your content with more links or search engine drops you or blacklist you then you are dead.
This is NOT a good business model and should never be the main source of income.
[+] [-] zelly|5 years ago|reply
The new SEO is optimizing social media. Your visitors and customers are out there, you can talk to them, they can talk to you. You either create a following or pay an influencer to rent their following. In a way this is like going back to the old days of promotion and marketing where you'd go door-to-door to sell. Nowadays the web is saturated and filled with so many scams that word-of-mouth and being associated with a trustworthy face has become important once again.
[+] [-] weisbaum|5 years ago|reply
1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea.
2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does.
3. SEO is not a zero sum game. Just because only one person can take the top spot for a grail keyword, that does not mean longer tailed variants or answer box results are not still valuable at driving tons of relevant traffic.
I'd suggest you take a step back and think more about what users coming to your site, or any site, would need to build trust in a brand instead of telling people to optimize their social media accounts. Followers are a vanity metric. High intent organic traffic is much more effective in the long run at communicating who you are and why someone should trust in your brand.
[+] [-] marcrosoft|5 years ago|reply
We at the SEO-institute-of-fill-in-the-blank can dramatically increase your traffic.
[+] [-] dumbfoundded|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john_moscow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a13n|5 years ago|reply
Yes, you are taking on a big platform risk in that your business depends on Google continuing to serve you high amounts of traffic. Does that mean "you will go extinct one way or another", heck no.
Risk management is a big part of building a business. Just because there's a low chance that you could lose a significant chunk of your revenue overnight doesn't mean the business isn't worth starting.
Every company has risk (AWS, Stripe, npm, etc, etc, etc).
[+] [-] riffic|5 years ago|reply
Social media is not a replacement for a great web presence.
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
Yes. Also, Google is cracking down on off-brand sites pushing medical advice.
[+] [-] killface|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WA|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickreese|5 years ago|reply
This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content.
Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing.
As long as links are the main proxy for curation and the average Joe just has a social media account I believe algorithms will continue to silence minority opinions.
A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.
[+] [-] nickreese|5 years ago|reply
There was a huge shift in the mindset of the average webmaster between 2006 and 2012 that preceded the legendary "Penguin" and "Panda" updates.
Running a website went from being a funky, cool thing to do if you were passionate about tech to something you did because you wanted to build a business.
Somewhere in there, people got privy to the value of links (blog comment spam was insane) and people suddenly got a lot more stingy about their links.
This coincided with a massive groundswell of people looking to build "personal brands" in all sorts of spaces and a huge rise in info products by relative experts instead of absolute experts.
Today the absolute experts (or people who are a few steps past a relative experts) are completely drowned out because of their lack of links, lack of domain history/authority, and the general noisiness of the web.
Weird to look back at this because I wasn't innocent in all of this either.
- I was one of those people who built a personal brand, had 10k people on my email list, and was going to sell an info product.
- I was one of those SEOs who built huge sites and ranked for all sorts of things simply because I had a stronger domain and knew I could push the smaller guys out.
- I was one of those guys who stopped linking.
- I was one of the people who caused this change...
- How can I be one of the people who undoes it?
---
The Mozilla news really has me shaken up about the future of the web.
We the people of hacker news are the people who have the power and skills to directly and indirectly shape the future of the internet. What are we going to do with them?
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
We used to call that DMOZ. Maybe it should be brought back.
[+] [-] jacobobryant|5 years ago|reply
Hey, I am working on basically this. E.g.: https://findka.com/u/jobryant (warning, takes ~10 seconds to load fully). You make a profile, add your top article/book/movie/music/etc recommendations, then you get (1) a feed of recommendations from people you follow, (2) an Explore page that gives you algorithmic recommendations (collaborative filtering, currently via an off-the-shelf SVD library).
Right now the curation is a little basic, but today I'm adding filter controls to profiles so you can see a person's recommendations for a specific content type. Eventually, I'd also like to add custom tags so you can have recommendation/awesome lists for anything.
[+] [-] dna_polymerase|5 years ago|reply
This. Not only for SEO but in general I'd love to see the sources to stuff I read, especially in news articles, which often do not link to anything. It would also be great for content discovery as a reader.
[+] [-] qppo|5 years ago|reply
If I had to make a really uninformed guess, the problem isn't identifying junk, but identifying what can be classified as junk without hurting their bottom line.
Because it's really easy as a user. Ratio of ads (or unrelated data) to content.
[+] [-] john_moscow|5 years ago|reply
Well, it turns out, the ranking of our site in most major queries hasn't changed. People are genuinely searching less for serious topics. There is definitely an economic slowdown, it just takes a long time to start affecting regular software jobs.
P.S. Ironically, a rather silly side project of mine, that is related to old computer games, had a surge of traffic at the same time. It's like the "work from home" people decided they are better off replaying that classic game or two since the boss isn't watching.
[+] [-] RyanOD|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justcomments12|5 years ago|reply
Around May 2020 the attacks started on your site, see your data: https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png
This botnet contains thousands of sites (so far I found this botnet includes 9000+ domains). The same botnet that's attacking my sites and thousands of others companies.
It may well be this is a foreign state cyber attack: so many sites are target and the 9000+ botnet domains to pay aren't free. No doubt this is costing governments lots of money.
When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging income. Sad but true.
Quality or best results is not the ranking factor anymore, it's large botnets that decide on the Google ranking.
Try Google disavow tool, it barely works, but at least it's something. I hope someday Google will fix this (ignore negative SEO), but for now this is the way things are.
[+] [-] ssvss|5 years ago|reply
Is it because botnet attack makes your site slow, and make it lose google ranking ?
[+] [-] tlarkworthy|5 years ago|reply
"Google Webmasters @googlewmc · Aug 11 On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated. Thank you for your patience!"
https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1293212810474921...
Edit: author says no https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/129398818471...
[+] [-] sjs382|5 years ago|reply
> With apologies, I have taken this post down: it has attracted a lot more attention than I expected, and I need to reconsider what I want to say on this topic.
[+] [-] argonix|5 years ago|reply
I respect the author in making this bold move of removing this. I would be interested in knowing what the updated views are.
[+] [-] adventured|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kartayyar|5 years ago|reply
And if you somehow think that gives you a right to show up in those results or be there if you benefited from showing up in results in the past, that's flawed thinking.
[+] [-] asadkn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JungleGymSam|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eloff|5 years ago|reply
I don't doubt people will do that as they have every other shady SEO technique, but Google will continue to fight it as spam.
At the end of the day I think quality content is still king and the only viable long-term SEO strategy.
[+] [-] jermier|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
If you train NLP on text generated by NLP, you're gonna have a bad time.
[+] [-] jl6|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debacle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weisbaum|5 years ago|reply
Your content isn't organized. I get to the site and I have no idea what to click on or how to find something that actually applies to me as someone looking for pain advice.
You have way too many internal links on these pages. Focus.
The content is all a wall of text with unclear headlines and sections that break up the content.
When you compare this to another site like healthline.com or draxe.com you can see the disparity.
Seems like you have done nothing to optimize the mobile experience, which is where id assume most traffic comes from seeing as they recently searched to a mobile first index.
Last but not least - what is 'Pains' and why is it the first link in the nav?
[+] [-] mef|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mef|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_check|5 years ago|reply
People are fairly impatient and when searching for something often hope for an answer as quickly as possible. This site seems heavily narrative based, with a number of paragraphs of content per point. I imagine that the median dwell time on the site is poor as a lot of people hit the back button to the SERP and just go to another page that cuts to the chase. Like the Physioplus page that this author mocks, which seems much clearer and succint.
We know that Google is constantly measuring and judging based upon that -- dwell time is king, and while SEO and desperate link solicitations might get you in contention, if the dwell time isn't there you will rightly get punted from the results. I doubt many care whether alternatives were written by a "high school dropout" if they get to the core of their need, which is usually developing the proper heuristics to know what they're dealing with.
[+] [-] aresant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinmhayes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbcondo714|5 years ago|reply
Matt Cutts answers the question: "Does Google consider SEO to be spam?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3151352
[+] [-] obilgic|5 years ago|reply
http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc...
[+] [-] neonate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] system2|5 years ago|reply
"partly my fault for building my business around organic search and failing to diversify over the years"
Build real businesses, solve real business problems and stop depending on search engine SEO niche sites. One way or another either the competition eats you and write all your content with more links or search engine drops you or blacklist you then you are dead.
This is NOT a good business model and should never be the main source of income.
[+] [-] tgb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sangama34|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Ijumfs|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tus88|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soulofmischief|5 years ago|reply