SEO Broke Journalism and I Helped

The Newsroom

It's 2011 and you're standing in a newsroom. A real newsroom. The kind with fluorescent lights and bad coffee and a police scanner in the corner that nobody listens to anymore but nobody's unplugged because unplugging it would mean admitting something about the state of local news that nobody's ready to admit. The carpet is that industrial gray-blue that exists only in places where people have given up on the carpet but haven't yet given up on the building. There are desks with actual papers on them, which in 2011 already feels like visiting a museum exhibit about how people used to work. The editor-in-chief has invited you in because the newspaper's website is getting less traffic than a local mommy blog, which is the specific comparison he made on the phone, with the specific tone of a man who went to Columbia Journalism School and is now losing a web traffic competition to someone named BethanysMomLife.

His name was David. I'm going to call him David because that's not his name and he deserves the dignity of anonymity, given what I'm about to confess about what I did to his newspaper. David was in his late fifties, had been in journalism since the Reagan administration, had covered city hall and the state legislature and three gubernatorial elections, and had won two regional press awards that he kept on the shelf behind his desk in the way that journalists keep awards - visible enough that you'll notice them, positioned casually enough that they can pretend they forgot the awards were there. David was a serious person who took journalism seriously, and he had called me, an SEO consultant, into his newsroom because the internet was eating his profession alive and someone on his board of directors had heard the term "search engine optimization" at a conference and suggested that maybe, possibly, the newspaper should try some of that.

I remember what I was wearing. This matters because I was wearing a blazer, which I almost never wore, because I'd decided that a newsroom required a blazer, that journalists would only take you seriously if you looked like you could plausibly be on CNN, which tells you everything about how I understood journalism at that point - as a visual medium where credibility came from looking credible. I was thirty-one years old and I had been doing SEO for about eight years, which in 2011 made me a veteran, which tells you everything about the maturity of the industry I was representing. Eight years. That's less time than David had spent on any single beat he'd covered.

He showed me around the newsroom and introduced me to the staff and I shook hands with reporters who had broken actual stories that had actual consequences in actual people's lives, and I smiled and nodded and thought about their headline tags.

That's the thing I need you to understand. I walked into a room full of people who had dedicated their careers to informing the public, people who had sources and ethics guidelines and a copy desk that still employed three human beings whose entire job was to make sure the facts were right and the grammar was correct and the style guide was followed, and the first thing I thought about was their headline tags. Their H1s. The thing Google reads first. I stood in a room where democracy's rough draft was being written and I thought: these people have no idea how title tags work.

I was right about the title tags. I was wrong about everything else.

What I Found

The newspaper's website was, by the standards of 2011 SEO, a disaster. And I say this knowing that in 2011, the standards of SEO were themselves a disaster, so we're operating at two levels of disaster here, a disaster within a disaster, like a Matryoshka doll made entirely of bad decisions. The site was running on a custom CMS that had been built in 2006 by a developer who'd since left, which meant nobody currently at the paper understood how the CMS worked, which meant every request to change anything on the website required calling a freelance developer who charged $150 an hour and had a three-week turnaround time. This is not an exaggeration. Three weeks. To change a meta description. I watched David's face when he told me this, and I saw the specific expression of a man who has explained this same absurdity to enough people that the absurdity no longer registers as absurd - it's just how things are, the way you stop noticing the flickering fluorescent light above your desk after the first six months.

The title tags on every article were formatted as "Newspaper Name | Section | Article Title," which meant that on Google, every result started with the newspaper's name, which is great for branding and terrible for click-through rates because nobody searches for newspaper names - they search for the thing the article is about, and by the time Google's truncated title tag gets to the thing the article is about, it's been cut off at sixty-five characters and replaced with an ellipsis. The reporters were writing headlines the way journalists write headlines - clever, punchy, often requiring context that only makes sense if you've already read the lede. "A Bridge Too Far?" about a local infrastructure dispute. "Cold Comfort" about a heating assistance program. Beautiful headlines. Artful headlines. Headlines that communicated absolutely nothing to a search engine about what the article contained.

The URLs were dynamically generated numeric strings that looked like they'd been produced by a random number generator having a seizure. Something like /article.php?id=48271&cat=3&ref=hp. The internal linking structure was essentially nonexistent - articles existed as isolated islands connected only by the homepage and section pages, which meant that a piece of investigative journalism that had taken three months to produce had the same site architecture importance as a two-paragraph brief about a school board meeting. There was no sitemap. The robots.txt file was blocking the entire /assets/ directory, which unfortunately included the directory where article images were stored, which meant Google had never indexed a single image from the newspaper's website. There were duplicate content issues because the CMS generated printer-friendly versions of every article at a separate URL with no canonical tags, effectively doubling the number of pages Google had to crawl while halving the authority of each one.

It was, from an SEO perspective, a gold mine. Everything was broken, which meant everything could be improved, which meant the results would be dramatic, which meant I could charge a significant fee and justify it with significant numbers. This is the part of the story where I should have felt some discomfort. I did not feel discomfort. I felt the specific excitement of an SEO consultant who has found a site with so many technical issues that the engagement practically sells itself.

I presented my audit to David and his senior editors in a conference room with a long table and a whiteboard and a window that looked out onto the parking lot where I could see my car, which I mention because I spent a lot of that meeting looking at my car and thinking about how confident I felt, which is a feeling I want to preserve in this narrative because it contrasts so sharply with how I feel about this engagement fifteen years later.

The Pitch

Here's what I told them. I told them that their headlines needed to change. That "Cold Comfort" needed to become "City Heating Assistance Program Faces $2M Budget Shortfall." That "A Bridge Too Far?" needed to become "Route 9 Bridge Repair Project Delayed By Funding Dispute, Could Take 3 Years." I told them that these headlines were what people were actually searching for, that nobody goes to Google and types "cold comfort" when they want to know about heating assistance (unless they're looking for the Burt Lancaster movie, which, fair enough, is an underrated film). I told them that their headlines were a barrier between their journalism and the audience that journalism was supposed to serve, that every clever headline was a locked door between a reader with a question and a reporter with the answer.

And you know what? I wasn't entirely wrong. This is the part that makes the story complicated, the part that makes it something other than a simple confession of villainy. The newspaper WAS failing to reach readers who needed the information. There WAS a public interest argument for making headlines more descriptive. If you've done a three-month investigation into corruption in the city's building inspection department, you probably want people to be able to find that investigation, and a headline that says "Cracks in the Foundation" - while clever, while literary, while the kind of headline that wins awards from other journalists - is not going to surface when someone searches "building inspection corruption" in their city.

I told them this, and I believed it, and I still believe the kernel of it, even as I've come to understand that what I was actually doing was much more complicated and much more damaging than "helping readers find journalism."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In the conference room, David listened. His senior editors listened. The digital editor - a woman in her thirties named (not really) Sarah who had been hired two years earlier as the paper's first dedicated digital person and who I could tell had been fighting battles like this alone for those entire two years - Sarah didn't just listen. Sarah leaned forward. Sarah took notes. Sarah had been saying some version of what I was saying for months, but it took an outside consultant with a blazer and a PowerPoint to make it land, which is a dynamic that says something deeply unflattering about how organizations process information depending on who's delivering it and whether that person has been given money.

I got the contract. Twelve months. I won't say the exact number but it was more than David's salary and less than a reporter's salary, which felt reasonable at the time and feels obscene in retrospect, given that I was essentially being paid to teach journalists how to be less like journalists.

Gutenberg's Children

There's a thing I want to talk about here, and it's the printing press, because the printing press is the only analogy for what search engines did to publishing that doesn't eventually collapse under its own weight.

When Gutenberg built his press in the 1440s, the first thing he printed was the Bible, which is the version of the story that people who are optimistic about technology like to tell. The printing press gave us the Bible. It democratized knowledge. It enabled the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment and eventually, centuries down the road, the ability for anyone to publish anything, which is a trajectory that sounds like progress and mostly is progress but also contains within it a quiet catastrophe that nobody talks about at technology conferences.

Because the printing press also gave us pamphlets. It gave us propaganda. It gave us cheaply produced garbage designed to inflame and mislead and sell, because the moment you reduce the cost of publishing to near-zero, you change the incentive structure around what gets published. When publishing is expensive, you publish things that are worth the expense - the Bible, scientific treatises, works of literature. When publishing is cheap, you publish whatever will get the most attention, because attention is how you recoup even a small cost. The tool doesn't degrade what it publishes. The economics of the tool degrade what gets published.

The internet did the same thing. It gave us Wikipedia and also content farms. It gave us independent journalism and also misinformation. It gave everyone a printing press and it turned out that most people, given a printing press, don't print the Bible. They print whatever gets clicks.

And SEO - my industry, my livelihood, the thing I've dedicated my professional life to - SEO was the instruction manual. SEO was the pamphlet that told you how to make more pamphlets. SEO took the infinite publishing capacity of the internet and added a distribution mechanism that rewarded volume and format compliance over substance. Google's algorithm, in its earliest and most influential years, was essentially a popularity contest, and SEO consultants were the people who taught you how to win the popularity contest, and winning the popularity contest turned out to be almost entirely unrelated to producing anything of value.

I knew this. Not in 2011 - in 2011, I was a true believer, a missionary of optimization, genuinely convinced that I was helping publishers reach audiences. But I knew it later, and I kept doing it anyway, and that's the part of this essay where the narrative shifts from "well-meaning consultant makes mistakes" to something less forgivable.

But we're not there yet. We're still in the newsroom. I still have the contract. And the traffic numbers are about to start going up.

The Optimization

I spent the first two months on technical fixes. The boring stuff. Title tag format, URL structure, sitemap, canonical tags, the robots.txt file, the image indexing issue, page speed improvements. I worked with the freelance developer (who, once I explained what we needed, turned out to be perfectly competent and actually quite fast when the requests were specific and technical rather than vague and editorial). We fixed the crawl issues. We fixed the duplicate content. We restructured the URLs so they were human-readable and keyword-relevant. We built internal linking templates that connected related articles automatically based on tags and categories.

The technical improvements alone moved the needle. Traffic went up 20% in the first two months just from fixing things that were broken. This is the boring secret of SEO that nobody wants to hear: most of the time, the biggest gains come not from clever strategy but from fixing stupid mistakes. Unblock the images directory. Add a sitemap. Make the title tags not terrible. Revolutionary stuff. David was pleased. The board was pleased. I was pleased because I hadn't even started the hard part yet and the numbers already looked good in my monthly report.

Then we started on content.

This is where it gets complicated. This is where I started doing the thing that I've spent fifteen years feeling weird about, the thing that looked like help and functioned like help and produced measurable results that by every metric the industry uses to measure success were unambiguously positive, and was also, in a way that I could not articulate at the time and can only barely articulate now, a kind of vandalism.

I trained the reporters to write headlines for Google.

I set up a workshop. A literal workshop, in the conference room, with the whiteboard. I stood in front of twelve journalists - people who had collectively won more awards than I'd ever been nominated for in any context in my entire life - and I taught them how to think about headlines. I showed them Google Trends. I showed them keyword research tools. I showed them the search volume for various phrases and the headlines that were currently ranking for those phrases and the gap between what people were searching for and what the newspaper was providing.

"Your readers are searching for 'property tax increase [city name],'" I said. "Your headline says 'The Price of Progress.' Your readers can't find you."

And the room split. I could feel it split. There were the reporters - mostly older, mostly veterans - who looked at me like I was suggesting they write in crayon. And there were the younger reporters and the digital editor Sarah who looked at me like I was finally saying the thing they'd been thinking. The split wasn't clean and it wasn't simple and I want to resist the temptation to make it generational because it wasn't entirely generational, but there was a division, and the division was about what journalism was for. The veteran reporters believed journalism was for informing the public through the craft of journalism - through careful writing, through narrative, through headlines that rewarded readers who had the sophistication to appreciate them. The younger reporters believed journalism was for reaching the public, full stop, and if the headline needed to be literal to reach people, then make it literal.

I sided with the younger reporters. Obviously. I was being paid to side with the younger reporters. But I also genuinely believed it, at the time, because the argument was compelling: what good is a brilliant headline if nobody reads the article beneath it? What good is craft if it's invisible? This seemed like an argument about accessibility, about removing barriers, about serving readers rather than serving the writer's ego.

It was not an argument about accessibility. It was an argument about metrics. But I didn't understand the difference yet.

The Numbers

Within six months, the newspaper's website traffic had doubled. Doubled. From roughly 180,000 monthly sessions to just over 360,000. This is not an exaggeration and I'm not rounding generously. The traffic doubled. The charts went up and to the right in a way that made my monthly reports look like I was performing magic, like I had discovered some secret of the internet that had been hidden from these journalists by their own stubbornness and traditionalism and unwillingness to adapt.

The keyword-optimized headlines worked. The article about the property tax increase that was previously headlined "The Price of Progress" became "Property Tax Increase in [City]: What Homeowners Need to Know in 2012" and it ranked on the first page of Google within a week and drove more traffic than any article the newspaper had published in three years. The city council coverage went from clever section headers to explicit, searchable, Google-friendly descriptions of exactly what was discussed at each meeting, and the city council articles - which had previously been read almost exclusively by political junkies and the council members themselves - started getting traffic from actual residents who were actually searching for information about actual decisions that affected their lives.

David was thrilled. The board was thrilled. Sarah was promoted. I renewed the contract for another year. Everyone was happy.

Except.

Except that I started noticing things. Small things. Things that didn't show up in the traffic reports but showed up in the newspaper itself if you were paying attention, which I was, because I was reading the newspaper every day as part of my job, tracking which articles were performing and which weren't and building a feedback loop between search data and editorial decisions.

The first thing I noticed was that the reporters had started self-editing. Not in the traditional journalistic sense of self-editing, where you revise for clarity and accuracy. In the SEO sense of self-editing, where you revise for keywords. I'd sit in the morning editorial meetings - David had invited me to attend the morning editorial meetings, which in retrospect was like inviting the fox to attend the henhouse's morning meeting about fox policy - and I'd hear reporters pitch stories in a way that was subtly but unmistakably different from how they'd pitched stories six months earlier. They weren't pitching the story anymore. They were pitching the headline. "I've got a story about the school board budget, and the search volume for 'school board budget cuts' is really high right now." The search volume was the justification. Not the public interest. Not the significance. The search volume.

The second thing I noticed was that the "what is" articles had started. This was my fault. I had specifically recommended "what is" articles. I had shown the editorial team data about informational queries - people searching "what is [local ballot measure]" and "what is [proposed development project]" - and suggested that the newspaper create explainer content to capture this traffic. This seemed like a public service! People had questions about their local government! The newspaper had reporters who could answer those questions! This was journalism meeting the internet in a productive and democratic way!

Except the "what is" articles were terrible. Not because the reporters were bad at writing them - the reporters were very good writers - but because the format demanded a kind of writing that was antithetical to good journalism. A "what is" article needs to answer the question in the first paragraph, clearly and directly, because that's what Google wants to surface in the featured snippet. A good journalist builds toward the answer, provides context, tells you why the question matters before telling you the answer. These two approaches are not compatible. You can write a clear explainer or you can write good journalism but the format constraints of one are hostile to the other, and when you're optimizing for search, the format wins. The format always wins.

The "what is" articles were accurate and clear and well-structured and they ranked extremely well and they were absolutely nothing. They had no voice. They had no perspective. They had no journalism in them. They were SEO content produced by journalists, and the tragedy was that you could feel the journalist being suppressed in every paragraph, like watching a singer perform karaoke - technically correct, spiritually absent.

The Moment

The specific moment I realized what I'd done - what I was doing, present tense, actively and for money - happened on a Tuesday afternoon in the newsroom. I was reviewing the editorial calendar with Sarah, looking at upcoming content and making suggestions about keyword opportunities (a phrase I used without irony at the time and can barely type now without wanting to apologize to the concept of language), when one of the veteran reporters, a guy named (not really) Mike who'd been at the paper for twenty-two years, walked past us and stopped and looked at the whiteboard where I had written a list of "content gaps" - topics with high search volume that the newspaper hadn't covered yet.

Mike looked at the whiteboard. He looked at me. He looked at Sarah. And he said, "You know what's not on that list? Anything that matters."

And he walked away.

Sarah rolled her eyes. I rolled my eyes. We had a brief conversation about how the old guard didn't understand digital and how resistance to change was natural and how the numbers spoke for themselves. We went back to the editorial calendar. I suggested three more "what is" articles. Sarah agreed they'd perform well. We were right. They performed great.

But Mike's comment stayed. It stayed because it was true in a way that I couldn't yet articulate and didn't want to examine because examining it would mean examining my entire career and the industry that career existed within and the possibility that the thing I was very good at was also the thing that was making the world slightly but measurably worse.

What wasn't on the whiteboard - what was never on the whiteboard, what couldn't be on the whiteboard because the whiteboard was organized by search volume - was the investigative work. The accountability journalism. The stories that nobody knew to search for because the whole point of those stories was that they revealed something nobody knew about. You can't keyword-optimize an investigation into corruption because before the investigation is published, nobody is searching for the corruption - they don't know it exists. The entire value of that journalism is that it creates the demand for the information by revealing the information. It's the opposite of search-intent content. It's supply-driven, not demand-driven. And my entire framework, the entire SEO framework, was demand-driven. Write what people are searching for. Create content that matches existing intent. Give the people what they want.

But journalism - real journalism, the kind that justifies the existence of newsrooms and copy desks and editors and reporters who spend three months on a single story - that journalism isn't about giving people what they want. It's about giving people what they need, whether they know they need it or not. And there is no keyword research tool in the world that can tell you what people need to know. There's only the judgment of a reporter who has spent twenty-two years covering a beat and knows, in a way that no data can replicate, that something is wrong at city hall and someone should look into it.

I did not have this insight in the newsroom that Tuesday. I had it years later, slowly, the way you understand most things that actually matter - not in a flash of revelation but in a gradual accumulation of evidence that eventually becomes too heavy to ignore. But the seed was Mike's comment. The seed was the whiteboard. The seed was the list of "content gaps" that had no room for anything that mattered.

The Broader Crime

Here's where I zoom out, because this isn't just about one newspaper and one consultant and one whiteboard. This is about an entire industry - my industry - and what it did to publishing over the course of about fifteen years, roughly 2005 to 2020, the period during which SEO went from a niche technical discipline to the operating system of the entire internet content economy.

The sequence is so clean it almost looks intentional, which it wasn't - it was emergent, the way all the worst things are emergent, produced not by conspiracy but by a million individual actors each making a locally rational decision that added up to a globally catastrophic outcome.

Step one: Google becomes the dominant way people find information. This happened roughly between 2000 and 2005, and it was genuinely revolutionary, and I'm not here to say Google was bad. Google was miraculous. The ability to type a question into a box and get an answer in 0.3 seconds was and remains one of the most impressive achievements in the history of human knowledge management. But it had a side effect: it made Google the gatekeeper. If you published something and Google didn't surface it, it functionally didn't exist. This gave Google an enormous amount of power over what got read, which gave Google an enormous amount of power over what got written.

Step two: publishers figure out that Google traffic is valuable. Obvious, but worth stating explicitly because the transition was not instant. There was a period, roughly 2003 to 2008, when many publishers - especially traditional media publishers like David's newspaper - treated the internet as a secondary distribution channel, a place to put your content after you'd published it in the real medium (print, broadcast, whatever). The realization that Google traffic was not supplementary but primary - that for many publications, the majority of their audience was finding them through search, not through subscriptions or bookmarks or brand loyalty - this realization changed everything. It changed the economics. It changed the editorial strategy. It changed what got published and why.

Step three: SEO consultants arrive to explain how Google works. This is where I come in, literally. I started doing SEO in 2003, which means I was part of the wave of people who showed up at publishers' offices and said, essentially, "I can get you more traffic from Google, and here's how." And the "here's how" was, at first, mostly technical: fix your site architecture, use descriptive URLs, write clear title tags, build a sitemap. Boring, useful, genuinely helpful stuff that made content more accessible and more findable and served both the publisher and the reader. I want to be clear about this because the story of SEO's complicity in the destruction of publishing is not a story about villains. It's a story about a reasonable thing that became an unreasonable thing through incremental escalation, each step logical, each step defensible, each step a little further from anything that could be called serving the public interest.

Step four: "optimize your headlines" becomes "write clickbait." The transition happened so gradually that I lived through it without noticing it, which is the hallmark of a transition that's going to cause enormous damage. In 2008, "optimize your headlines" meant "make your headlines descriptive so that search engines and readers can understand what the article is about." By 2012, "optimize your headlines" meant "write headlines that maximize click-through rate from search results, which means promising slightly more than the article delivers, which means emotional triggers and curiosity gaps and the word 'shocking' and questions that you won't answer until the reader clicks." By 2015, "optimize your headlines" was indistinguishable from "write clickbait," and the people who had been doing it the longest - people like me - could trace the exact evolutionary path from "write clear headlines" to "write manipulative headlines" and could point to the exact moment where they crossed the line, if they were being honest, which most of them weren't, which I wasn't, because the traffic numbers were very good and the invoices were being paid.

Step five: "create content for search intent" becomes "produce the minimum viable article that matches a keyword." This is the big one. This is the step where SEO stopped being a distribution strategy and became a content strategy, and the difference matters enormously because a distribution strategy helps good content find its audience while a content strategy determines what gets created in the first place. When I told David's newspaper to write "what is" articles about local ballot measures, I was making a content strategy recommendation. I was telling a newsroom what to publish. I was an SEO consultant with eight years of experience in search algorithms telling journalists with decades of experience in journalism what journalism should look like. And they listened to me. And the traffic went up. And the journalism suffered.

The "minimum viable article" became the dominant form of internet publishing roughly between 2012 and 2020. You know what it looks like because you've read ten thousand of them. It's 1,500 words because the data says long-form content ranks better. It has an H2 every 300 words because the data says subheadings improve on-page SEO. It answers a question in the first paragraph because the data says Google surfaces the first paragraph in featured snippets. It includes a bulleted list because the data says bulleted lists get more featured snippet placements. It links to three authoritative sources because the data says outbound links signal trustworthiness. It is formatted perfectly and written competently and contains absolutely nothing that a human being would voluntarily read for pleasure or edification or any reason other than needing the answer to a specific question and being willing to tolerate 1,500 words of keyword-optimized pablum to get it.

This is what the content marketing industry is. This is what I helped build. This is the wreckage.

The Wreckage

Let me be specific about the wreckage because I think the people who work in my industry have become very good at abstracting it, at talking about "the content landscape" and "the evolution of digital publishing" in ways that sound analytical rather than confessional.

Newspapers died. Not just because of SEO - newspapers died for a hundred reasons, including classified ads moving to Craigslist and display advertising moving to Facebook and a fundamental unwillingness by both readers and publishers to pay for digital content. But SEO accelerated the death in a specific way: it taught newspapers that the way to survive online was to produce high-volume, keyword-targeted content instead of the labor-intensive, expensive, slow journalism that was the entire reason newspapers existed. SEO gave newspapers a way to compete for traffic without competing on quality, and competing on quality was expensive and competing on SEO was cheap, so guess which one the bean counters chose.

David's newspaper is gone now. It was acquired by a regional chain in 2014 and folded into a network of "local news" websites that publish the same AP wire stories with different city names in the headlines. The reporters were laid off. Mike was laid off. Sarah survived the acquisition and lasted two more years before leaving journalism entirely - she works in marketing now, which is a sentence that contains so much irony it should be studied in literature classes. The building with the fluorescent lights and the police scanner is now a Pilates studio. I drove past it three years ago and saw the sign and sat in my car in the parking lot for a while, not because I was overcome with emotion (that would be too neat, too cinematic, too much like a writing workshop exercise about The Moment Everything Changed) but because the Pilates studio had a website and I found myself, reflexively, automatically, pulling it up on my phone and checking its title tags.

That's how deep it goes. That's what twenty years in this industry does to your brain. You can't look at a Pilates studio built on the grave of a newspaper without thinking about its SEO.

Magazines died. Trade publications died. Specialty publications died. And in their place, a content marketing industry arose that produces more text per day than the entire publishing industry produced per year in 1990, and almost none of it is worth reading, and all of it is optimized, and I helped build the system that incentivized it and I trained the people who produce it and I collected invoices the entire time.

The content marketing industry is built on the wreckage of institutions that used to produce things worth reading. That's not a metaphor. Content marketing literally occupies the niche that journalism and trade publishing used to fill. When someone searches "how to choose a financial advisor" and finds a 2,000-word article on a wealth management firm's blog instead of a consumer finance journalist's reported piece, that's the wreckage. When someone searches for information about a medical condition and finds a hospital's content marketing instead of a health journalist's investigation into that hospital's infection rates, that's the wreckage. The SEO-optimized content appears where journalism used to be, and it looks like journalism, and it reads like journalism (more or less, if you're not paying close attention), and it is not journalism. It's marketing wearing journalism's clothes.

And the clothes fit. That's the worst part. The clothes fit because SEO consultants like me spent fifteen years teaching marketers how to write like journalists - use the inverted pyramid, cite sources, adopt an authoritative tone, include data, create "comprehensive" content that addresses the reader's "search intent." We reverse-engineered the qualities that made journalism credible and stripped them of the thing that actually made journalism credible - the institutional commitment to truth over commerce - and sold the husk to marketers as a "content strategy."

The Confession

I want to be precise about what I'm confessing because the easy version of this confession is "I feel bad about what SEO did to journalism" and the easy version lets me off the hook because it positions me as a passive observer of an industry-wide phenomenon rather than an active participant who made specific choices that had specific consequences.

I'm not a passive observer. I optimized headlines. I recommended "what is" articles. I taught journalists to think in keywords. I built editorial calendars organized by search volume. I sat in newsrooms and told reporters that their instincts about what was important were less valuable than my data about what was popular, and I said this with enough confidence and enough PowerPoint slides that they believed me, or at least their editors believed me, which amounted to the same thing because editors control what gets published.

I did this not once but dozens of times, across multiple publications, over the course of roughly a decade. David's newspaper was the first but it was not the last. I worked with regional magazines and trade publications and online-only news outlets and in every case I brought the same toolkit and the same recommendations and the same framework, and in every case the traffic went up and the quality went down and I collected my invoice and moved on to the next one.

The traffic went up. I need to keep saying this because it's the core of the confession. If the traffic had stayed flat, if the recommendations hadn't worked, the story would be simpler - I'd just be a bad consultant who wasted people's money. But the traffic went up. The recommendations worked. The framework produced the results it was supposed to produce. And the thing that made those results meaningful - the journalism, the editorial judgment, the institutional knowledge, the commitment to covering what mattered rather than what was popular - that thing shrank, gradually and then suddenly, until one day you'd visit the website and you couldn't tell the difference between the newspaper's content and any other keyword-optimized content marketing operation on the internet.

That's the crime. Not that the traffic went down. That the traffic went up and the thing that made the traffic worth having went away.

Whether There's a Way Back

People ask me this. They ask me at conferences (the ones I still attend, which are fewer every year because standing on a stage and giving SEO advice has started to feel like selling cigarettes at a cancer research fundraiser). They ask me in client meetings. They ask me in emails. Is there a way back? Can we undo this? Can we rebuild the thing we broke?

I don't know. That's my honest answer and it's not a satisfying one and I'm not going to pretend to have a framework or a twelve-step program or a "path forward" because the whole point of this essay is that frameworks and programs and paths forward are how we got here - they're the language of optimization applied to a problem that optimization caused, and applying more optimization to the consequences of optimization is like trying to put out a fire by throwing smaller, more strategic fires at it.

What I know is this. Google's Helpful Content Update, which rolled out starting in 2022 and which I've written about elsewhere on this site, was Google's attempt to fix the problem. The update was designed to identify and demote exactly the kind of content I spent my career teaching people to produce - the keyword-optimized, search-intent-matched, minimum viable articles that technically answer the query but provide no original insight, no expertise, no value beyond the bare informational minimum. And the update worked, sort of, in the way that all algorithmic solutions to human problems work - imperfectly, with collateral damage, catching some of the bad actors and punishing some of the good ones and leaving the fundamental incentive structure mostly intact.

The fundamental incentive structure is the problem. Not Google. Not SEO. Not content marketing. The incentive structure. The fact that publishing on the internet is free, that distribution is controlled by algorithms, that algorithms reward measurable engagement, that measurable engagement is easier to produce with optimized mediocrity than with expensive excellence. That incentive structure existed before I started doing SEO and it will exist after I stop and no amount of algorithmic adjustment or industry hand-wringing or confessional essays on consultant websites will change it.

What can change is individual behavior. And here's where I've landed after twenty-plus years of doing this, after training newsrooms and optimizing publications and watching the things I helped optimize become indistinguishable from the content farms they were supposed to be competing against.

I've stopped telling clients to write for search intent. I still do SEO. I still fix technical issues and optimize site architecture and build internal linking structures. The plumbing still matters. But I've stopped telling people what to write about. I've stopped building editorial calendars organized by search volume. I've stopped recommending "what is" articles and "how to" articles and every other format-driven, keyword-first content template that the industry has convinced itself is "content strategy." Because content strategy, as the industry practices it, is just a nice word for "let Google's search volume data determine what you publish," and letting Google's search volume data determine what you publish is how you end up with a thousand websites all saying the same thing in the same format with the same keywords and none of them saying anything worth reading.

I tell my clients to write what they know. To write from experience. To write things that could only have been written by them, not by anyone with access to the same keyword research tool. I tell them that the best SEO strategy in 2026 is to be the person who wrote the thing that everyone else is trying to rank for, to be the original source rather than the optimized copy, to produce the thing that creates demand rather than the thing that meets it.

This is harder. It's slower. It doesn't produce the kind of hockey-stick traffic charts that get contracts renewed. But it produces something worth having, and in a world where Google's algorithms are getting better at distinguishing between original insight and optimized repetition, it's also - and I want to be careful about making this argument because making this argument risks turning a moral case into a strategic one, which is exactly the kind of optimization-brained thinking I'm trying to argue against - it's also better strategy.

But I didn't arrive at this position through strategic analysis. I arrived at it through standing in a newsroom and watching reporters learn to think in keywords, through reading "what is" articles that had been written by people who were capable of writing things vastly better than "what is" articles, through driving past a Pilates studio and checking its title tags and realizing that the reflex itself was the disease.

I helped break journalism. I didn't do it alone and I didn't do it on purpose and I did it while genuinely believing I was helping, which is the most common and the most dangerous way that things get broken. And the traffic doubled. And I collected my invoice.

I don't have Mike's phone number. I don't know what happened to him after the layoffs. But if he ever reads this - Mike, you were right. Nothing on that whiteboard mattered. I'm sorry it took me fifteen years to understand what you said in five seconds. The search volume for "I'm sorry" is surprisingly high, but that's not why I'm writing this.