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The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

(casparwre.de)
1743 points caspii | 8 comments | 07 Jun 21 21:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.513s | source | bottom
1. commandlinefan ◴[07 Jun 21 21:53 UTC] No.27427573[source]▶
I suspect this will only get worse over time. There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that represented you) made a point of understanding everything that went into it. But, even as what's considered a professional web site has gotten exponentially more complicated, too many people see setting up an online presence as something like printing a brochure: details irrelevant. Somebody who does understand the details is going to use them to their advantage.
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2. onion2k ◴[07 Jun 21 22:06 UTC] No.27427769[source]▶
There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that represented you) made a point of understanding everything that went into it.

I've been making websites for 24 years. Making a website has always been quite hard, especially for a nontechnical user, and there has always been scammers happy to take their money. What's worse is that a lot of the time the scammers believe they're actually selling a good service. There have always been people happy to chuck any old rubbish up on a domain and call it a website, even if it was full of scammy links, stuffed keywords the same color as the background or in tiny text, with JS that overwrote your browser history and blocked the back button, with no context menu, etc etc.

Its annoying, and sad, for those of us who care and consider ourselves professional. But it definitely wasn't any better years ago.

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3. julianz ◴[07 Jun 21 22:39 UTC] No.27428188[source]▶
True. A company we bought in the very early 2000's was paying $1000 a month to an SEO "expert". The expert hadn't noticed that the site had a robots.txt file that was excluding all search bots but was still happy to take their money and produce faked up reports about how busy they'd been pushing search terms around.
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4. adventured ◴[07 Jun 21 22:58 UTC] No.27428387[source]▶
I agree, there has been a clear, negative direction of stacking complexity in Web development for the past 20 years. It's one of the primary reasons Wordpress has 1/3 of the Web and there is a cottage industry of developers that specialize in just hacking at Wordpress to make it do things it's not particularly great at. Most people and most businesses can't come remotely close to building their own high-functioning sites (from scratch) in a cost effective manner, while getting all the critical details (eg building for SEO) right. So you get an obese do-everything CMS, and throw in some plug-ins, to sort of shim the problem.

Why is Shopify worth $150 billion? Well, other than the bubble, this effect is why. People can't easily build their own ecommerce sites, can't integrate everything they need to, in a way that doesn't cost them a small fortune.

Wix is a pretty mediocre service, clunky and slow. It's worth $15 billion? How in the world does that happen. Well, building sites is super difficult for most people. The opportunity to make that problem better is, apparently, huge.

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5. bentcorner ◴[07 Jun 21 23:53 UTC] No.27428880[source]▶
Feels similar to "Reflections on Trusting Trust".

Could someone inject links into content in such a way that you cannot find the link in your own source or even your hosting stack?

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6. bombcar ◴[08 Jun 21 03:08 UTC] No.27430214[source]▶
You could modify the web server to modify the code in a similar way to the reflections paper.

But even more imaginative would be to work it into the kernel or the ssl layer somehow.

7. zyemuzu ◴[08 Jun 21 06:17 UTC] No.27431201{3}[source]▶
I have had two clients in two years that have had that exact issue. In both cases they were WordPress websites, my friend and I refer to them as 'WordPress Specials'. It is obscene considering the amount the clients originally paid, but it works well for me as the client immediately sees a dramatic jump in the SERPs as soon as the new site goes live, and that's before any of the general improvements in navigation, content and structure!
8. Moru ◴[08 Jun 21 06:32 UTC] No.27431271[source]▶
What they value is the users, not the platform as such.