Technical SEO - as I use the term - describes tasks like the following:
1) Performance optimization (One of the most important tasks)
It's basically me telling my clients that their Devs were right all along and that they have to improve their site's speed
2) UX feedback (Help in terms of usability and user experience because unusable sites will rank much worse on Google)
This is basically me telling my clients that their "fancy" 200.000 $ redesign will never rank in Google and that they have to use a "boring" design. (Their Devs were right again ...)
3) Improve internal linking (Prioritize important pages with high search volume, deprioritize less important pages)
More complicated, but this is one of the most important tasks for "big" websites (e-commerce, news, travel, ...) and one of the biggest levers to improve rankings
A lot of other related tasks are not that easy to explain for me in text (I am a non-native English speaker and this comment already took me 20 minutes up until here ...) and my guidelines vary from website to website.
But, essentially, I help clients to adhere to web standards and optimize their websites for their users. The last "spammy" backlink I build for a project other than my side-projects (experiments) was probably more than 5 years ago ...
In my opinion: It's neither ethical nor necessary!
There are easier ways to get a website ranked. Publishing good and useful content, creating a valuable product, optimizing your site (for crawlers and users), and following a sane marketing strategy is much more important than backlinks and page rank. I never had any problems outranking poorly made sites that had a much "stronger" link-profile than my sites.
Needless to say: You will also build a better product/business if you do not waste your focus on cheap SEO-tricks ...
But I do not judge people using these tactics: SEO is daunting-game and - as long as Google acts as intransparent and unpredictable as it has in the past - people will focus on "esoteric" tactics.
Before anyone out there buys one of these domains for SEO-purposes:
I work as a technical-SEO consultant and we had the funny idea of checking all these domains about a year ago: None of them are worth buying! None of them has any SEO-potential!
- the page-rank passed from milliondollarhomepage.com to these domains is minimal (huge PR divided through tons of links is worthless)
- domains expired for a long time get some sort of "reset" from Google (we experimented with this - strong domains last used years ago do not rank faster than "fresh" domains)
Therefore, in the case of PageRank and SEO-potential: It is better to try to buy domains of local companies in your area that went out of business. These are much stronger.
And in general: Buying old domains for backlinks is a waste of time. Getting high-quality backlinks from legit sites and improving your own domain in regards to technical optimization and usability is much more effective - and scalable.
Most of the author's arguments are compelling, but I am very skeptical if any app in the west will ever reach super app status.
Regulators are already considering actions against FANG, although, if compared to Tencent, neither Google's or Facebook's positions in the market seem that threatening at all ...
Building a "real" super app might actually be dangerous for any company int the west.
Disclaimer: Non native english speaker - I am doing my best so please ignore my errors...
I read a bunch of the books on the list the most interesting to me that I have not read for now are:
- The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change
- Stealing Fire
- Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
- The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
Has anybody here on HN read those? Are these any good? I am usually quite sceptical regarding Amazon recommendations (or some random CEOs thoughts), but most of the time love books recommended on HN...
In turn my thoughts about some of the books on the list:
- Shoe Dog: Probably the best and most inspiring biography/memoir of any entrepreneur I have ever read. If you are thinking about starting a company or are a founder you will love it!
- Sapiens: Fantastic book that completely shattered parts of my worldview. In my opinion a must read for everyone! (Gave it away as a present for many of my friends - almost everybody liked it)
- Extreme Ownership: The best book regarding leadership I have ever read. At first I was skeptical about the "military-parts" of the book, but they have been useful in illustrating the underlying principles the book covers. If you are in any leadership position (top management, middle management or leader of a very small team) it is definitely worth your money.