Who cares? I don't want sites that "bootstrap popularity", I want sites with quality content.
To quote XKCD[1]: "I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at." If you're more worried about getting your content onto the front page of Google than about having content that's good enough to end up on the front page of Google, you're never going to produce anything I care about.
EDIT: The question "How exactly do you bootstrap popularity?" is the most repugnant, repulsive thing on this thread. I can at least empathize with people who are trying to create content and now have to find a different way to fund it. But you're literally just trying to achieve popularity without doing anything that deserves to be popular. It's people like you that I'm trying to avoid when I use an ad blocker. Your goals are diametrically opposed to mine. I don't want anything to do with whatever crap you want to shove in my face. I want the internet to be a place for people to share art and information that helps push humanity forward, and you want to add noise to the signal. Your small-minded profiteering is literally holding humanity back, and I can't wait for you to go out of business.
I think you've ascribed more malicious intent to the person above you than is fair. Repugnant and repulsive are huge stretches for many genuine businesses starting out.
Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on.
How do you demonstrate your ability for a decent chance at ranking well? Door knock to get early customers and then rely on word of mouth or reviews? That's advertising with a shotgun approach and could intrude on people when they're at home with their family. Letter box drop? Advertising.
AdWords and decent contextual advertising not an unreasonable option at getting in front of people already interested in your service.
> I think you've ascribed more malicious intent to the person above you than is fair. Repugnant and repulsive are huge stretches for many genuine businesses starting out.
The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits. They're changing the rules in a bad way, and I don't much care about their intent: they're screwing up the internet and it's repugnant even if they don't intend it to be.
> Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on.
So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way.
You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete, but the only reason they need to manipulate their rankings is because their competition is manipulating their rankings. I'm saying I would rather remove manipulation from the system and let people compete on their actual merits. Ads are the problem, not the solution.
>The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits.
The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality.
>So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way.
I call BS. You've obviously no real experience promoting a product or service from scratch.
You could have 30 years of experience as a plumber and go out on your own as an independent contractor and you'd be starting from ZERO. Not from experience. You can't just take your former employer's customers; that's unethical and typically against your employment contract. So you have to find new customers under a new brand.
And it's arguably worse for promoting other products or services today. I had 20 years of experience when I struck out and started my own company again; that experience opened doors when I made personal connections to work with people, but it meant crap for my indie game release. Most popular games would fail without being propped up by advertising (and some would be less valuable to their players if they weren't as popular -- I'm thinking of games where you play against others, and so the more people who play, the more valuable the game is to everyone. Standard network effect).
>You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete
Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular.
How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?
> The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality.
And many aren't. The question is: what heuristic better matches the average person's definition of "actual quality".
Let's look at this as if you were approaching this as a fresh, new problem: you're trying to design a heuristic that finds products that most closely match what people want. You'd have to be an idiot to think that "products that paid me to rank them higher" is a good heuristic. Even very naive heuristics would be better.
Paid advertising serves advertisers and people creating crappy products who can artificially inflate their image. It doesn't serve consumers or people creating quality products.
> Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular.
No, I'm saying that advertising breaks popularity as a good metric. If it weren't for ads, organic popularity would be a good metric of quality. But advertising allows people to manipulate popularity in their favor without actually providing quality.
> How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?
I don't. I think that creating something good takes time. Why do you think people are entitled to a get-rich-quick scheme?
Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction.
Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.
> Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction.
There are two sides to this coin. You could argue that they have a hard time gaining traction because they aren't advertising. But I'm arguing that they are having a hard time gaining traction because other people are advertising.
> Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.
Often your model of advertising does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more buying ads.
Just because Google also fails doesn't mean that ads are a successful way to find information. Ads and Google's search can both be bad heuristics.
Do you honestly think Google's rankings for "plumber in cityx" are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on the net than under a sink?
Or maybe which ones got online back when SEO was trivial. (I once ranked #2 in my country for "make money" with a 5-minute site almost completely devoid of useful info.) Or when keyphrase domains dominated.
For many industries, AdWords is just another layer in the arms race completely detached from the actual product/service.
> Do you honestly think Google's rankings for "plumber in cityx" are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on the net than under a sink?
Do you honestly think ads are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on advertising than under a sink?
At least when I search, Google is trying to provide me quality search results. I'm not arguing it's perfect: it's obviously not. But ads aren't even trying to serve my interests, they're trying to serve the interests of advertisers.
The first result has high PageRank. If no one has heard of a new product, how can it get high PageRank without some kind of promotion?