This is very generous of you!

If I was the author, however, I'd still feel like I've been put in a predicament where I need to spend personal agency to fix something that Google has broken.

While that may just be a fact of life, my internal injustice-o-meter would be raging. Like, Google is going to take hours of my life because they, with all their billions of capital, can't figure out the canonically-true website when it's RIGHT THERE in the GitHub repository?

Ugh. I guess that's just the day we live in. But it makes me rage against the machine on the author's behalf.

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MerrimanInd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I had the exact same thought while reading the above comment, as helpful and generous as it is. Google's entire business model is to help people find things on the internet. They're an insanely well resourced company with all kinds of smart programmers. They have a moral and financial incentive to direct people to canonical sources of information. And STILL it's on this open-source dev to do all the steps outlined just to get the situation corrected?

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pocksuppet 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Google's business model is to help Google's customers pay money to Google. Google Search's customers are mostly scammers who run adverts. Helping the user find a thing is at odds with helping the user find a scam that pays Google money.

	▲	nickff 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is somewhat true; despite what HNers seem to think, online ads are not very effective (in terms of convincing people to buy things), and Google 'screws over' its advertising customers as often as it delivers deficient search results to users.

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allthetime 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The billions of capital are exactly why they don't care about you. Also, Google didn't break anything. The only person who can claw out a place in this giant machine for yourself is you - all while billions of others attempt to do the same.

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sam1r 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can’t be the only one blasting killing in the name of in my noise canceling headphones the moment I read your comment..

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7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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gowld 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How many Google search results would point to OP's site?

If Google didn't exist, how many Google search results would point to OP's site?

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input_sh 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> This is very generous of you!

No it's not, it's a sales pitch that intentionally ignores some of the things pointed out in the article. The author has invested time into proper SEO optimization, legit websites already link to it et cetera, it's all explained in the article.

From the perspective of a spammer: They need like 2 million MAU to earn below minimum wage. You're never getting those figures by doing something legit and actually useful to a tiny subset of people. You either need a vague site beyond any point of usefulness to anyone or you need a network of knockoff sites. The reason you can't compete with these shitty SEO spam version of your site is because they already have a network of "authoritative" (in Google's eyes) sites and all they have to do is to link from them to a new one to expand their shitty network.

From the perspective of SEO agencies: They can't guarantee results. They can tell you vague, easily-googleable best practices and give you an output of some SEO SaaS that's far too expensive for an individual to purchase. Ahrefs(.com) is the prime example of this, the cheapest paid version costs $129/month. Do you care about SEO that much? No, so you go to these agencies and give them money for them to give you the output of such a tool. But that SaaS also only contains vague and nebulous "things to fix" to follow "best practices" because they also cannot know what drives traffic to your competitor from the outside perspective.

My best suggestion would be to start a website from day one. Doesn't matter how good the website is at first, Google favours sites that exist for longer. If you're creating a website after the knock-off version already exist, you might as well give up immediately, it's gonna be near impossible to recover from that.

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adamtaylor_13 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> No it's not, it's a sales pitch that intentionally ignores some of the things pointed out in the article.

Sales pitch or not, someone offering their time to help me with a problem is feels generous to me. To each their own, I suppose.

But again, you reinforce my point in your last sentence. Now anytime I want to make any little toy project (because how can anyone know when their toy project will blow up overnight?) I have to make a full blown website just to ensure I don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion?

My point still stands. Google is the problem and while we likely can't effectively do anything about it, it's frustrating as hell.

	▲	input_sh 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I never said Google isn't the problem, what I said is that going to an agency isn't gonna fix that problem any more than running a SaaS tool yourself will, because they're not Google and they have no insight into what Google made one website prioritised over the other. Because, as you've pointed out, Google is the problem. > I have to make a full blown website just to ensure I don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion? No, I said a crappy one on purpose. How good is it doesn't matter, the sooner the Google knows about the domain, the better. Might as well be a copy of your README file using one of the million SSGs GitHub supports that will turn that README file into a website. The only thing that matters is that the website exists and that Google knows about it before the other one. That's why many people purchase the domain on day 1 before they even start building the thing and also why many have like a dozen domains in their account that is like a boulevard of broken dreams there to remind them once a year they haven't done anything with them. Still cheaper than a SEO agency or in most cases even one month of ahrefs access.