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

(casparwre.de)
1743 points caspii | 5 comments | 07 Jun 21 21:35 UTC | HN request time: 1.12s | source
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cybice ◴[08 Jun 21 06:48 UTC] No.27431350[source]▶
As webdeveloper I have a strong feeling that we are writing web for google bot and not for people. For any website I created I have a list from SEO what to add. Like 200 links at each page bottom, different titles, headers, metas, human readable urls without query params, all that canonical urls, nofollow rules etc. Most of this things invisible to users and created only for googlebot.
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1. ricardo81 ◴[08 Jun 21 07:35 UTC] No.27431615[source]▶
Some of the technical SEO is good though, like simply making the page crawlable and content being in a logical order.

The "fiddle with H1" or "write X amount of words" or "buy Y number of links with a % of anchor text" is silly.

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2. tomcooks ◴[08 Jun 21 07:41 UTC] No.27431648[source]▶
> Some of the technical SEO is good though, like simply making the page crawlable and content being in a logical order.

Semantic HTML has been created to help screen readers and browsers understand content organization, it having been hijacked by SE is just a side-effect.

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3. ricardo81 ◴[08 Jun 21 07:45 UTC] No.27431673[source]▶
The point I was meaning to make is that it's quite easy to make a site uncrawlable, and therefore unfindable in search engines.

e.g. Google always had problems indexing Flash websites. It historically had issues with sites heavily relying on Javascript. Nowadays it's less of a problem, at least for Googlebot.

4. lvncelot ◴[08 Jun 21 08:07 UTC] No.27431782[source]▶
Yes, but even for those, it means that we are left to hope that what's good for a crawler and what's good for e.g. a screen-reader will still align in the future. Right now it feels almost coincidental.
5. dspillett ◴[08 Jun 21 10:20 UTC] No.27432822[source]▶
Though a useful side effect of SEO people finding it to be a useful side effect, is that what they are doing for their gain may help overall accessibility (where too often the opposite is the case, when people trying to game systems accidentally affect accessibility, it is usually negatively).