kpreid comments on Hack Away at the Edges - Less Wrong

48 Post author: lukeprog 01 December 2011 01:26PM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 December 2011 06:25:05AM 5 points [-]

SEO has to be hard for the simple reason that it's zero-sum. You're competing against all the other people doing SEO.

Comment author: kpreid 05 December 2011 01:20:07PM 4 points [-]

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.