Opinions, hot takes, and contrarian views on SEO, AI search, and the industry.
No filter. No hedge. Just what I actually think.
Technical SEO as internal combustion engine. Four strokes. Twelve engineering concepts. Specific metrics with specific targets.
You control them. They're free. They work. So why are you begging strangers for backlinks like a mendicant friar with a broken begging bowl?
How a kid who set up web feeds at his Oklahoma high school became the person Google is betting its entire AI future on. An investigation.
A meditation on an industry built on air, the economics of attention, and why agrarian life starts looking attractive after twenty years of optimizing uncertainty.
Google has 200ms to answer you, and half of that is the speed of light through fiber. Everything else is a fast guess made by hardware that fails constantly.
A whole bag of peanuts, half a jar of peanut butter, a can of sardines, and one fateful sneeze taught me more about Google's algorithm than 20 years in SEO.
When will we rank on page one? Your agency doesn't know. Your consultant doesn't know. Your in-house SEO definitely doesn't know but has learned to nod thoughtfully while inventing a number.
Everyone mourns the 60% traffic drop from AI Overviews. But that traffic never converted. Those visitors bounced. Google is doing you a favor by removing your vanity metrics.
Generative Engine Optimization is 14 months old. No one has real data. Every GEO strategy is guesswork dressed as expertise. Stop optimizing for things you cannot measure.
CDN vendors convinced the SEO industry that edge caching is essential for rankings. It's not. Your 130ms latency savings are meaningless when your JavaScript wastes 4 seconds.
Everyone obsesses over convincing Google they deserve to rank. But that's the wrong game entirely. The real game is becoming the entity Google has no choice but to rank.
20 years of SEO distilled into what actually works. No fluff, no frameworks, no funnels. Just the tactics that move rankings, explained honestly.
Every time Google announces an update, the industry panics. Everyone scrambles to figure out what changed. But chasing updates is a losing game.
Google won't tell us how ranking works. The SEO industry complains about this constantly. But our entire business model depends on the mystery.
The Search Liaison. The helpful content updates. The public guidance. It's all a communications strategy, not a technical one.
Every year, someone declares SEO dead. Social media killed it. Mobile killed it. Voice search killed it. AI killed it. Yet here we are, still optimizing.
Monthly SEO reports are creative writing disguised as analytics. Cherry-picked metrics, meaningless graphs, and narratives built to justify retainers.
The local SEO industry has built an empire on something simple: get reviews, update your business info, don't be terrible. That's it.
Everyone cites Google's 200 ranking factors. It's become SEO gospel. But it's a myth that's been holding the industry back for over a decade.
Google's SEO certification. HubSpot's certification. Semrush Academy. None of them will make you better at SEO. Credentials don't equal competence.
Publishing 3 blog posts per week because the calendar says so. Quantity targets that sacrifice quality. Here's why your editorial calendar is the enemy.
The same people retweeting the same takes, congratulating each other on insights that never get tested. SEO Twitter isn't education - it's performance.
That impressive case study showing 500% traffic growth? It's probably cherry-picked, misleading, or outright fabricated. Here's how to spot the fakes.
Domain Authority isn't a Google ranking factor. It's a number Moz made up. Yet the entire SEO industry treats it like gospel. Time to stop.
The companies that win at SEO are the ones that would succeed without it. Build something people search for by name and the rankings follow.
E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor. It's a concept from Google's Quality Rater Guidelines - a document that has no direct impact on algorithms.
You pay $400/month for data Google gives you for free. Ahrefs and Semrush are brilliant businesses. That doesn't mean you need them.
Every agency leads with an audit. It's their foot in the door. But that 50-page PDF won't fix your real problem: you have nothing worth ranking for.
You've spent three weeks in Ahrefs building the perfect keyword strategy. Meanwhile, your competitors published 20 articles and are already ranking.
You paid $2,000 to attend a conference where every "session" is a pitch deck. The speakers are selling. The sponsors are selling. You're the product.
Google convinced the entire web industry to optimize for metrics that barely matter. Meanwhile, slow sites with great content still outrank fast empty ones.
We spent a decade killing content farms. Now everyone's building them again with ChatGPT. Same garbage, shinier packaging, faster production.
Every algorithm update, the SEO community screams bloody murder. But Google doesn't owe you anything. You built on rented land. Now pay the rent.
You don't have a technical SEO problem. You have a content problem. Stop hiding behind crawl budgets and schema markup.
The SEO industry is addicted to backlinks like it's still 2010. Meanwhile, Google has moved on. You should too.
Most SEO work takes a few hours a month. Agencies charge thousands to do what one person with a checklist could handle.
Stop building SEO strategies. SEO is a set of tactics that serve your marketing - not a strategy itself.
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