Experiment

A lot of positive things have been happening on Steemit lately. I would call it a lot of small improvements made by different people. There are even more different discussions. In particular, SEO and Steemit's bad friendship with the Google search algorithm are sometimes mentioned.

We already know one of the reasons why it is so difficult to find a post published on Steemit in Google search results. This was explained to us by @the-gorilla. In short, the problems started with the introduction of communities. If the post is published in the community, then in its address it has an incomprehensible for the search engine tag hive-145157, because of which the content is poorly indexed and even worse ranked. So, if you've written an in-depth post, say about tomatoes, and you want it to be read by as many readers as possible who come from a Google search, it's better to publish it on a personal blog under the tag #tomatoes.

Search algorithms are complex, so the right tag is only one component. Recently, the Steemit Engagement Challenge has undergone a major change, which has resulted in authors posting large, informative posts, sometimes outside of the communities. Some of these posts are real thorough guides and definitely bring value to the reader. I was wondering if Google reacted somehow to the appearance of such posts. So I did an experiment. I took the SEC topics from last week and entered them into Google as search queries to determine where I would find my first post from Steemit. Here are the results:

Search request	The place of the post from Steemit in Google
Hematopoiesis	not found among 178 results
Introduction to Programming	not found among 277 results
Painting like a child	31 (but this post is 7 years old)
Introducción al Crochet	2 (post written 10 hours ago)
Business Ideas	not found among 279 results
Databases and SQL language	not found among 200 results
Introduction to Graphic Design and Principles	4 (post written 6 days ago)
Introduction to Pattern Making	not found among 300 results
A Comprehensive Guide to Flutter Mobile Application Development	6 (post written yesterday)
Salads	not found among 296 results
Salads	not found among 280 results

What do the results say? First of all, about the fact that Google does not really trust such a source of information as Steemit. Even more frustrating is the fact that all the Google search results, without exception, have resources like Reddit and Quora, where people often post copied information from others without even citing the source. Even Spotify is sometimes in the search results, but Steemit is not. Often in the second hundred positions you can find dozens of different videos from YouTube that have no text at all, but it is impossible to find a good thorough post from Steemit.

It's a bit frustrating, because I don't think a good readership will prevent a blockchain based on social interaction. I also don't think the readers will be superfluous to a resource where people blog, reveal their personal details or share their own experiences. On the contrary, we need readers, we really need them. When I write a post, I imagine that someone is reading it, I don't write it purely for rewards.

With this short post, I wanted to check again how Steemit is doing with SEO. So far, the results are not very good. I hope someone from the developers will be interested in looking at the results of this experiment. Is it possible to improve the situation? Honestly, I don't know. No one will rewrite the entire site to optimize it. I was just trying to satisfy my curiosity. 🙂