SEOs & Google Didn’t Ruin The Internet & The Internet Is Not Ruined

SEO

By Chris Barnhart Last updated Nov 4, 2023

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The SEO community was in a buzz yesterday when The Verge published an entertaining, detailed, and long piece titled Did SEO experts ruin the Internet or did Google? The short answer is no, SEOs didn’t ruin the Internet, Google did not ruin the Internet, and the Internet is not ruined. But the article and author said otherwise.

I was hoping not to cover it but I cover what the SEO community is buzzing about and oh boy was there a lot of buzzing yesterday, so much so that I cannot include all that buzz in this story.

It is a super long read but in short, what the author, Amanda Chicago Lewis, did was go with a the premise that the Internet and the Google search results are worse today than they were 10 or 20 years ago and she tried to figure out why that is the case.

I’ve been reporting on search for 19 years and 11 months (a month from today is my 20 year anniversary of covering search) and I will say these things in reaction to this story:

• Search is way better than it was in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 an even 2020
• The changes Google makes to search not only drive better search quality, in general (not always – there are plenty of examples where Google gets it wrong)
• The changes also push publishers (site owners) to build better sites; better content, faster sites, more secure sites, etc
• The stories told in the story are about the early days of SEO
• The early days of SEO were like the wild west and Google was super easy to manipulate

SEO conferences no longer have crazy wild parties sponsored by Yahoo

Most of those who told those stories mentioned in the Verge story no longer do SEO because SEO is harder now

It is super hard to trick Google, not that it is impossible but it is incredibly hard

SEOs in the late 90s and early 2000s were in their basements monetizing low cost web sites

Now SEOs go to corporate offices, get mentioned on public companies earnings reports, have titles like VP of SEO

Again, this whole article started with a premise that internet search, aka Google, is worse today than it was a decade or two ago. That is 1000% false, I know, I wrote over 40,000 stories stories on Google Search in 20 years. SEOs have matured and are real professionals, with real people, real families, getting a salaried paycheck, health insurance, 401ks and stock options.

It seems as if this author doesn’t know what the internet or search looked like 15 years ago.

I believe the author worked on this story for over six-months, she spoke to some really credible SEOs and I am super impressed she was able to speak with both Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts. Plus she writes incredibly well and the whole read was absolutely entertaining.

I recommend you read the responses from Danny Sullivan and Danny Goodwin and Gianluca Fiorelli on this. Oh, and the Verge’s Editor-In-Chief Nilay Patel posted about Sullivan’s response here saying, “ultimately Google’s guidance was so opaque that we excluded quick posts from the search index rather than accept the traffic risk. (We’re going to let them get indexed soon, though. Yolo.)” I should add that I do find it interesting that Danny Sullivan had an email chat with The Verge about its redesign for SEO purposes… I do like that the feedback was “opaque,” but that is for a different story (which Danny addressed in a postscript on his blog)…

Techmeme also has a good roundup of the reaction to this story.