A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.
The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.
Worked with more than a few SEOs. Software developer here.
I’m sorry you’ve had bad experiences. There are a lot of bad SEOs, but there are a lot of good ones. I’ve worked with a lot of shitty developers as well.
Would it be fair of me to blame software developers for the likes of Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, or poorly implemented Wordpress pages where links get hijacked and redirected to spam? Or those that use AI to write code? Or for slapping resource on top of resource to slow down pages and bandaid shitty spaghetti code?
Edit: or pushing out half baked bullshit that breaks or has a ton of holes? As if the software development industry isn’t responsible for coding worms, trackers, or other malicious stuff. So many hacks/charlatans in software development too.
Yup, blame away, but also recognise lots of good that they have done too. Open Source, the fediverse, medical software, communications software. To name but a few. What good have SEOs ever done?
Positioning non profits, government agencies, and more competitively in results. Even Google gets outranked for their own keywords.
User experience and flow for many companies that don’t have these people, suggesting content topics to solve questions, ensuring that sites are found/rendering correctly and pointing out/fixing developer fuck ups, creating accessibility (markup suggestions and alt text), finding ways to compete with competitors.
Don’t confuse content and marketing with SEO. Many of them don’t listen to us anyway.
Re-read that and ask if any of it has actual value. Gaming Google is a bad way to make a living. Playing by their rules makes you complicit. You are part of a cabal of rogues that extort businesses into better results and if they don’t play then they are relegated to oblivion. The world would be a better place without SEOs. All those examples are because other SEOs have broken the system. The world would be a better place without Google at this stage. Do you bother with any other search engine? Do you try to make things better instead of trying to exploit a dying service that only maintains it’s monopoly through anti-competitive business practices.
Seriously: fuck SEOs. Go take your good skills and intelligence and go do something worthwhile
Accessibility is because SEOs games the system? Developers not knowing how their JavaScript and code render to crawlers is SEOs gaming the system? Are you serious?
You realize mom and pop shops don’t have marketing experts or big teams to help them compete? You do know that prior to Google, you paid PEOPLE to list your site on a directory? Because bribes and human fallibility doesn’t exist, right?
If you’re so smart and SEOs are fucking it all up and you have such a problem, what is your solution? No one else has figured it out - not Bing, not DDG, not Jo schmo’s flavor of the month search engine. Now we have AI to mass produce and provide shitty content to the masses, thanks software engineers. You will ultimately end up having done more harm than ANY SEO ever did.
Most directories were free actually. You could buy an advert if you wanted a bigger listing, far more transparent and helpful than whatever snakeoil SEO peddles. And SEOs taking credit for accessibility is akin to serial killers controlling the excess population. And you are grumpy about AI causing you long term search problems? Dare I say a loss of revenue and oblivion? Well cry me a fucking river. Welcome to the party, maybe now you’ll realise you are as unwanted as LLM search results
Yes they were free. There are back channels to people, dude. You should read about the history of SEO.
I’m not saying SEOs are responsible for accessibility, I’m saying they help others provide it! Like the mom and pop places I mentioned. You only asked for what good SEOs do and I provided examples. You’re so angry that you are projecting ideas that I didn’t say.
Every fucking thing you have mentioned is literally not SEO but some other stakeholder that has control of how everything works. SEO is just a means to make sure your company is the one that gets the visibility and a click because all other companies made it that way.
And the guy you quoted, Rand Fishkin, is one of the many SEOs that have been calling Google out on their bullshit for YEARS now. We know Google is shit but they are the elephant in the room and are the lexicon used as a verb worldwide.
Your fight isn’t with SEOs, it’s with the companies that gatekeep everything else and change the rules so everyone has to adapt. I’m done arguing. Your responses are Boolean with a true or false as long as it fits your narrative and you refuse to believe that there is any good in SEO. That’s fine and you’re welcome to your opinion.