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Eugine_Nier comments on Hack Away at the Edges - Less Wrong
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I actually think you have it backwards there. The reason people aren't engaging in this activity is because it is the opposite of mundane. It is confusing, difficult, and requires previous skills.
General Evidence: There are lots of postings for Search Engine Optimizers, and they all want applicants to already have experience doing SEO. If it was something that was so mundane that anyone could do it with a couple hours of training, what you'd see instead are "no experience necessary" job postings for SEO where the company is willing to take an hour or two to train a schlub that they can then pay minimum wage too.
(Speaking of minimum wage, if you guys are spending a significant amount of your time doing menial tasks like moving furniture, it might be time to get a schlub of your own. You can pay someone $8/hr to do menial tasks 20 hrs/ week, for a total of about $8000 / year.)
Personal Anecdotal Supporting Evidence: I clicked on your link, and the thought in my head wasn't "oh, this is too mundane", but rather was "wtf?? This looks super-complex and confusing. It must be the type of thing that "computer people" know how to do. Not something for me. I don't have the knowledge or skill-set"
SEO has to be hard for the simple reason that it's zero-sum. You're competing against all the other people doing SEO.
This is probably less relevant for "technological singularity" than it is for, say, "cheap air fare."
How many people who aren't already familiar with SIAI search for "technological singularity"?
Probably quite a few. Wikipedia records roughly 2,000 daily readers for that article; someone already familiar with SIAI probably isn't going to be going there thinking 'what was that "singularity" thing again?'
I don't know.
I do know that SIAI thinks "technological singularity" is a search string it's valuable to SEO for, since it's on their list of search strings to SEO for.
In principle, “good” SEO is not entirely zero-sum: it improves the quality of search results, by making sites, and pages within those sites, which are relevant to the user's query more likely to show up in results than irrelevant sites and pages, and the results for those pages to be more clear about what they’re about.
Successful SEO is zero-sum to the degree that it is done by sites competing against each other which are fungible to the searcher, as TheOtherDave hints. There's also a lot of advice and offers for doing this sort of SEO because that's where the perceived money is.
There's making your site look good (to the search engine), and then there's making your site be good.