
Ask HN: Why so many SEO posts all of a sudden? - ilamont
This morning I have observed three SEO posts in the top 15 links on Hacker News:<p>- Black Hat SEO Case Study: How Mahalo Makes Black Look White<p>- Some SEO Advice For Bill Gates<p>- Strategic SEO for Startups<p>Is this a coincidence, or can it be explained by something else, such as a sudden influx of SEO types to this forum?
======
jacquesm
It's not just SEO, it is practically any subject on HN that gets a periodic
wave of interest.

I think it is simply tied in to the nature of the web. If you 'inject' a bunch
of users via a link on HN in to a spot on the web then from there they will
spread like sinking a mineshaft will exhaust the resources in the
neighbourhood of the shaft.

Then, when that particular mine is exhausted (no more interesting content to
be found around that locus in the web) the subject dies down until someone
finds a new and untapped reservoir.

I've seen this happen around all kinds of subjects, from programming languages
to hardware hacks and political stuff.

~~~
TrevorJ
That is a really interesting analogy, I would have never thought of it in that
regard.

------
mattmanser
The first post submitted had a link to at least one of those other sites. Then
I guess some HN people went through the linked sites and submitted stuff they
found interesting.

Happens all the time, a fairly unknown blog gets submitted, then all of a
sudden two or three more posts from that blog pop up on HN as people start
exploring the new content (well, new to them). I've also noticed it happens to
unknown stories linked in blogs.

~~~
nsrivast
As a result, the subject of submissions is autocorrelated. I wonder if this
could be visualized using this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048866>

------
patio11
Phase one: spend a year here, amassing 16k karma by being mostly helpful and
well informed.

Phase two: write a post on a favorite topic I havent covered in a while.

Phase three: lure a cynical,disinterested, and not really wealthy audience to
my blog.

Phase four: while you are not on HN, wage a sudden takeover by SEO content.
After that it was all over but the cackling.

------
jcromartie
SEO.

~~~
ntoshev
Why the downvotes?

Practically everyone who sells SEO services has a blog explaining what is SEO,
how it works and why you should hire him. These blogs are SEO'd to the maximum
of the owner's ability, of course. What I hate about these articles is that
they are optimized for indexers, not humans: the explanations doesn't make
much sense but they try to cram in all the relevant keywords. Interestingly,
this works well also with humans in a short-attention-span mode: you would
think the article is useful if you just skim through it.

I have stopped reading anything mentioning SEO in the title so this may not be
the case with the mentioned articles, but it is the explanation why I stopped
reading them: the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
the article by patio11 (startup seo) was really good and was well written. Not
everything can be dismissed outright :)

------
CoryMathews
To me most SEO articles = Spam. Thus when I see a lot more articles I just
assume o yey more spam.

------
rms
Maybe because lots of people who like SEO read these forums? At a certain
amount of users, sub-interests can gain a voting-block like effect. We'd need
to see more data about increased SEO posts to know for sure though.

------
chaosmachine
If people see a particular topic being upvoted, they're more likely to submit
articles on that topic.

------
c00p3r
Because it is not a next big thing anymore and even teenagers can do it. And
because google itself is just a mainstream. =) "The main navigation system" as
some clever guy named it.

