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UMB.FYI & SEO driven articles
# social
m
Hey folks, just wondering if I can get some feedback from people for UMB.FYI specifically around SEO driven articles 🧵
Every time I prep an UMB.FYI I have to question some blog posts as technically the content they present is correct and maybe useful to some, but it's clear it was written for SEO purposes to drive traffic to their site. They are usually the "why use Umbraco/product" or "state of the industry" style articles. I currently include them, however today had to drop a bunch of articles because it was clear the same author had created a series of SEO filler articles which were then plastered over affiliate sites to drive traffic. I get it from an SEO perspective, but from an UMB.FYI newsletter perspective I'm just not sure of the value. It's a hard line to balance as there are some independent package dev companies that create similar content, content designed to drive adoption of their products. I generally say if it's one or two articles, and the content actually offers something then it can go in, but if like today I just get plastered by these things, I'm going to have to refuse. What are peoples thoughts on this type of content in UMB.FYI? Does anyone actually read it? Or you bothered it's there? Do you know to just skim passed it if it sounds like marketing filler?
The goal of UMB.FYI was to share everything that happened in the Umbraco space the previous week, but if it's just going to get spammed, it may have to become curated.
j
I have noticed quite a bit of SEO-content (or AI content perhaps?) lately and not just on your newsletter. It does not offer any value to me to read the same sentiments over and over again. They essentially copy the umbraco.com blog articles.
s
Don't mind individuals or companies promoting themselves a little at the end of an article. But I don't wanna have to sift through slop - that's why I sign up to the newsletter, to get the high quality stuff 🙂
m
I read an article recently from someone who also runs a newsletter which is heavily automated and I know they use OpenAI to score content based on relevance to a topic, giving it a score from 1 to 5 and anything that scores lower than a 3 is ignored. Maybe I should add another automation to the project that scores content so I can at least see if it has much relevance. I guess anyone signed up to the newsletter is going to be a developer or an agency or a user of Umbraco so they already know the basics so the usual salesy posts wouldn't be a relevant 🤔
s
I think to automate that analysis your prompt needs to be really, good, it's probably going to take some time to dial it in, but that would be very useful to have as an indicator!
j
I'd personally much rather have fewer high quality posts!
p
Are you able to track how many times people click on the various links? Maybe you could use those statistics to determine what sort of articles to show or not
m
I can’t as I have click tracking disabled. I didn’t want to have any tracking on the newsletter to respect people’s privacy.
My thought for now is to just show the score in the backoffice so I can decide whether to include it or not so it doesn’t have to be perfect. I can hone the prompt if I think it’s too restrictive or too forgiving.
Ultimately though I don’t want to have to read everything myself to validate it
s
Sounds great Matt #h5yr
m
It's another fun AI thing to try out so worth a play around if nothing else 🙂 I appreciate the feedback 👍
s
Thank you for your human touch
j
I see a lot of this stuff whenever I am looking for Skrift articles as well. Sometimes I'll include genuinely informative ones that are around why you should upgrade your Umbraco version, generally for members of the community who may be on the fence, but they have to have really good points - not just be SEO fodder. Generally, I don't include articles like this because it simply isn't useful to our audience. I feel like you are likely in a similar boat (they're not very useful to me as a tech lead anyway )
... I said generally 3 times in that message. I'm going to go jump off a how-to-write-a-good-message cliff now
s
Repeating yourself 3 times is generally okay with me 😛
m
I only see 2 and one genuinely 😄
All I have to do is click my little guage icon and it'll scrape the links content and send it to OpenAI to score for value, depth and impact. I get a number back between 1 and 5. 1 - 2 == garbage, 3 == questionable, 4 - 5 == good stuff. I just render a coloured bar under the link (red, orange, green) as a quick indicator as to whether to include it.
w
Yep that Joe guy definitely a bot 😂 seems super sus
s
You could gather some community members, and send them links to different articles from the archive, and let them score the articles. Then use the results of that score for your AI prompt.
Would love if the community could help bring down AI slop
m
Yea, I also contemplated some kind of Hacker News style voting system to allow people to rate the article from the newsletter. I guess you could use those votes to give AI an idea of what people want and then see if it can auto filter
Made a few prompt tweaks, and also categorize content so that a articles are scored by type so that a guide compared to a technical tutorial aren't scored on the same basis. Joes article now scores a 5 🙂 https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1379749578055618643/1380494934900998174/image.png?ex=68441598&is=6842c418&hm=e33b3e928b4f6ab7bcca0e932e91b4eb87c1196539b64160c1ff38f3adf2bf8c&
j
"If the author is Joe Glombek give it top score" 😄
m
😉
j
I like this idea 🙂 How high do you think the risk is for abuse?
m
It’s probably the reason I didn’t bother. It wouldn’t really be worth the effort to make it bulletproof. And even if I got it in place, the next thing is keeping people engaged and having them come back and actually vote after they have read an article, so likely hard to get meaningful votes. Maybe if you were the size of HN, but we’re only talking like 650ish newsletter subscribers which is not a big enough pool to compensate I don’t think. Hence why I’m focusing on the AI approach.
j
Yep that makes absolute sense.
m
I’m sure it won’t be perfect but I just think it’ll be a little more reliable and tweakable when it’s not quite right.
Plus I get to play some more with AI 😂
j
Hey, any excuse to learn is a good enough reason for me. As long as it doesn't start blocking my content. I guess if we lose Joe it's probably okay (I KID)
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