Why content is king on the internet

Daniel Pataki
Dec 18, 2008
Updated • Feb 15, 2012
Internet
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Working as a web developer I get a lot of requests regarding SEO and getting to the top of Google as fast as possible. While code-wise a lot can be done, this is nowhere near enough. If you want to get anywhere near good rankings you will need solid content that keeps coming regularly. Once you have good posts on a blog for example people will come.

Apart from the reason that content is weighed most heavily by Google, all other so called "methods" are temporary. In the beginning there was the "fill your site with invisible keywords" method. The point of this was to create a huge chunk of text containing keywords, and setting its visibility to none. This means its still in the code, so Google sees it, but users don't. Try that now and you'll get a ban in seconds. Then came the meta tags period where people used to give huge-long descriptions and lengthy meta keyword lists. While not such a 'sin', it won't give you what you're looking for.

My point is that everyone wants to cheat search engines and while it is of course a possibility, its only a matter of time before they get ahead of you. If you're lucky you fall back a few hundred places, if not, you're banned. As with every other business you have to work at it. I mean gHacks has 4,851 posts right now, over almost four years, that's about 3.5 posts every day. Not all are written by Martin nowadays, but I bet he started the blog alone, and up until not too long ago he had a day job.

So if you want to go instantly to number one, you really need a great idea, like Twitter, Remember The Milk and so on. Otherwise you will have to keep at it. if you're passionate about what you're doing, you'll find so many little successes on the way. When I started my own blog, Hack Your Day after about a 5 days if you typed "Hack Your Day" into Google I was at number 8-9, Hack a Day, Lifehack and so on were in front of me. After a month or so I was at number 1. This is of course of no use at all, but still a small victory, showing I'm doing something right.

If you're doing a project on the web, especially a blog, keep in mind that you won't be successful in a matter of days, it will most like take years if it ever happens at all. Hey, if it was easy, where would the challenge be?

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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

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