If you, like me, have been doing SEO for more than 10 years, you probably have some memories of the “good ole days.” These were the days during which we could outsmart Google in order to rank first.
Google was less sophisticated back then.
Just like the Joker and Batman, we played the seemingly never-ending cat-and-mouse game of looking for creative ways to “hack the system” or bend Google’s rules in our favor.
The result was that we could obtain good rankings, but in reality, the end-user (the actual human who was searching for the content we wanted to rank) was just an afterthought.
In 2012, before forming Rock Content, my blog had over 1.3 million sessions. I was publishing over 1,000 articles per month.
The quality of these articles was questionable. I had multiple variations of a single How To Fry An Egg tutorial; all of them were stuffed with more than 500 words. I’m not proud of that.
Let’s Look at What Has Changed Since That Era
Google’s Not-So-Secret Hidden Agenda: What It’s Been Telling Us All Along
For decades, SEO practices were heavily influenced by a strong focus on outsmarting bots, pulling out tricks, and creating complex formulas for phone number lists success. Before 2011, that was all possible because Google was not “very smart”.
Over time, Google proved us wrong. Google had, in fact, become very smart, and every time it updated its algorithms, there was a not-so-subtle message between the lines:
“Ignore me. Focus on human connection.”
Take a moment to step out of the granular details. Look at the full picture of the most prolific updates to this search engine’s core. Let’s decode what it was actually telling us.
Ignore Google Satisfy Users
Looking back, it’s neither a secret nor a surprise that Google has been planning this from the beginning.
The search engine has been increasing in human awareness, morphing to become more user-focused and human-centric. It must adapt to Mailing Lead survive, otherwise, the search results won’t be valuable anymore.
Google is forcing all of us to move away from the technical details of algorithm updates and focus on the detailed needs of real people.
Ignore Google. Satisfy Users.