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

(casparwre.de)
1743 points caspii | 2 comments | 07 Jun 21 21:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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superasn ◴[08 Jun 21 00:24 UTC] No.27429148[source]▶
Google really needs to come up with a better way than backlinks to rank sites.

It's 2021 and surprisingly for all the billion dollar A.I. it can still be gamed with a bunch of unrelated links with little or no connection from the article to the site.

Also it's pretty unnatural and shady to get these backlinks. For my own SaaS site almost every blogger I contacted for a review just straight up asked me money in exchange for link. What the software did was of no consequence to this exchange. Most sites which have these "list of 10 XYZ" are just similar money making scams yet they rank so highly on Google.

P.S. And likewise I too get dozens of emails daily with "offers" from free article to actual dollar amounts just for putting a paid link. These SEO guys are just relentless because such shenanigans are working great at beating Google so far.

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dafelst ◴[08 Jun 21 01:14 UTC] No.27429517[source]▶
Backlinks are not as important as Google would have you think, they are a pretty weak ranking factor except in the deep tail of the web.

Google (and others) keep up the narrative that they're important so that black and grey hat SEO folks keep focusing effort in the wrong places.

Source: ran the web spam detection team on a different well known search engine

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superasn ◴[08 Jun 21 01:46 UTC] No.27429725[source]▶
That is certainly eye opening and it's really amazing news. Hopefully in future the rankings could be fairly decided on usefulness and merit than who can buy or trick the most links.

Anyway so how would you explain the rankings of sites in this article? I thought all that was going for these guys were just the insane amount of links pointing to their site.

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1. wyaeld ◴[08 Jun 21 03:29 UTC] No.27430352[source]▶
Google collects immense of data about people's actual visits. Backlinks used to be a proxy for how authoritative things were You don't need the proxy when you have the record of where people actually visit.
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2. rocho ◴[08 Jun 21 05:55 UTC] No.27431072[source]▶
That's very effective for the top results. But if legit sites cannot rank in the first spots they'll get orders of magnitude fewer visits than the scam sites that employ SEO hacks to get the first places.