In the 14th century, some of the smartest people in Europe were alchemists. They weren't charlatans. They weren't fools. They were serious scholars who'd dedicated their lives to understanding the nature of matter. They had elaborate theories, complex apparatuses, technical vocabularies that would make your head spin. They produced results that seemed to validate their methods. They trained apprentices who carried on their work for generations.
They were also completely, catastrophically wrong about almost everything.
The fundamental premise of alchemy was that base metals could be transmuted into gold through the right combination of processes. If you could just find the philosopher's stone, the right reagent, the correct sequence of distillations and calcinations and sublimations, you could turn lead into gold. The entire discipline was oriented around this goal.
And here's the thing: sometimes it seemed to work. Sometimes the alchemist would perform an experiment and end up with something that looked like gold. Or at least something shinier than what they started with. These occasional apparent successes kept the entire field going for centuries. The alchemists weren't lying. They genuinely believed they were making progress. Each failed experiment revealed a new variable to control. Each apparent success suggested the grand theory was correct.
What they didn't understand, couldn't understand, was that the entire paradigm was wrong. You can't turn lead into gold through chemical processes because gold and lead are different elements. The project was impossible from the start. Not difficult. Not requiring more research. Impossible in principle.
I've been doing SEO for twenty years, and I've come to believe that we're the alchemists.
The Philosopher's Stone of Search
Watch how SEOs talk about their work. Listen to the conference presentations. Read the blog posts and Twitter threads. What you'll find is a discipline with all the hallmarks of alchemy:
Elaborate theories that can't be falsified. When an SEO tactic works, it validates the theory. When it doesn't work, well, there must have been a confounding variable. Google must have changed something. The site must have had other issues. The theory is never wrong. Only our application of it.
Arcane vocabulary designed to impress. We talk about E-E-A-T and topical authority and semantic relevance and crawl budget optimization and SERP feature targeting and entity salience. These terms have precise meanings to us. They sound impressive to clients. But are they actually describing real phenomena, or are we naming our own assumptions?
Occasional successes that sustain belief. Every SEO has war stories. The site that went from page 10 to position 1. The client whose traffic tripled. These successes keep us going, keep us believing in the discipline. But did we actually cause those outcomes? Or did we just happen to be there when they occurred?
An industry of practitioners training more practitioners. There are SEO courses, SEO certifications, SEO agencies, SEO tools. Billions of dollars flowing through an ecosystem built on the premise that ranking in Google is a technical problem with technical solutions. That if you know the right combination of factors, you can transmute any website into a top result.
This is the philosopher's stone of search: the belief that there exists some process, some technique, some optimization that can take any content and make it rank. That ranking is something you do to content, not something content earns.
The Experiment That Changed Everything
A few years ago, I ran an experiment that broke my brain.
I had two clients in similar industries with similar domain authority and similar content quality. One hired me to do comprehensive SEO work. The other hired me as an advisor but implemented almost nothing I recommended. For six months, I optimized Client A to within an inch of their life. Title tags, meta descriptions, header hierarchy, internal linking, schema markup, page speed, everything. Client B got monthly emails from me that they mostly ignored.
After six months, Client B was outranking Client A for almost every shared keyword.
At first, I explained this away. Client B must have had better content. Their domain must have been stronger. There must be factors I wasn't seeing. But as I dug deeper, I couldn't find the explanation. By every SEO metric I knew how to measure, Client A should have been winning.
Then I talked to actual users of both sites. And I realized something that should have been obvious: Client B's website was better. Not better optimized. Better. More useful. More clearly written. More obviously trustworthy. When you landed on their site, you knew within seconds that these people knew what they were talking about and wanted to help you.
Client A's site, after all my optimizations, felt like it was trying to rank in Google. Client B's site felt like it was trying to help visitors.
Google could tell the difference.
The Paradigm We're Missing
Here's what I think is actually happening, and I warn you, this is going to sound almost too simple:
Google has gotten good at its job.
Not perfect. Not omniscient. But good. Much better than we give it credit for. And the thing Google is good at is determining what content actually helps people.
In the early days, Google couldn't really understand content. It had to rely on proxies. Links were a proxy for trustworthiness. Keyword frequency was a proxy for relevance. Meta descriptions told Google what the page was about because Google couldn't figure that out on its own. The entire SEO discipline developed around these proxies. We learned to manipulate them, and manipulation worked.
But over twenty years, Google has gradually replaced proxies with understanding. It doesn't need you to tell it what the page is about. It can read. It doesn't need external links to know if content is authoritative. It can evaluate expertise directly. It doesn't need exact-match keywords. It understands concepts and synonyms and context.
We're still optimizing for proxies that Google stopped relying on years ago.
This is exactly like alchemy. Alchemists weren't stupid. They developed sophisticated techniques for manipulating the properties of matter. But they were manipulating surface properties while the underlying atomic structure remained unchanged. No amount of heating or cooling or dissolving or precipitating would change lead's atomic number from 82 to 79.
SEOs aren't stupid either. We've developed sophisticated techniques for manipulating the signals Google uses to rank content. But increasingly, Google isn't relying on those signals. It's evaluating the thing itself. And no amount of optimization will make mediocre content actually good.
The Thermodynamics of Tactics
Let me bring in another scientific concept that I think explains what's happening: the second law of thermodynamics.
The second law states that entropy in a closed system always increases. Roughly translated: things fall apart. Order becomes disorder. Hot things cool down. Differences even out. This isn't just physics. It's a fundamental principle about how the universe works.
SEO tactics are subject to their own version of the second law. Here's how it works:
Someone discovers a tactic that works. Maybe they notice that pages with certain schema markup rank better. They share this discovery. Others adopt it. The tactic spreads. More and more pages use this schema. And now Google faces a problem: a signal that used to indicate quality content is now present on all content, quality or not.
So Google has two choices: continue using a signal that no longer differentiates, or reduce the weight of that signal. Google always chooses the latter. They have to. Their product depends on surfacing the best content, not the best-optimized content.
This is SEO entropy. Every tactic that works contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more widely adopted a practice becomes, the less value it provides. Eventually, all tactics regress to mean. The system moves toward equilibrium, where everyone is doing the same thing and nobody gains advantage from it.
The SEO industry responds to this by constantly searching for new tactics. New tricks. New arbitrage opportunities. We're running to stay in place, finding new forms of fuel to burn as old ones are exhausted.
But here's the thermodynamic insight: in a closed system, entropy always wins. You can't beat the second law. Every tactic eventually decays into uselessness. The only way to maintain order, to maintain advantage, is with a constant input of new energy from outside the system.
And there's only one source of energy that works: genuine value creation.
The Lindy Effect and What Actually Persists
There's a concept from Nassim Taleb called the Lindy Effect. The idea is simple but profound: for things that don't have a natural lifespan, their future life expectancy is proportional to how long they've already survived.
A book that's been in print for 50 years is likely to be in print for another 50 years. A technology that's been around for a century is likely to outlast a technology introduced last year. The old has proven its ability to persist. The new hasn't been tested yet.
Now apply this to SEO. What tactics from 2005 still work today? What advice from early SEO practitioners remains valid?
Not the technical tricks. Not the link schemes. Not the keyword stuffing or the exact-match domains or the article spinning. All of that is dead or dying.
What still works is embarrassingly simple: create content that helps people, make it easy to find and use, build genuine relationships with people in your industry, and let word spread.
These principles worked in 2005. They worked in 2015. They work in 2025. They'll work in 2035. They're Lindy. They've survived because they're true, because they're not based on exploiting temporary weaknesses in Google's algorithm but on aligning with what Google fundamentally wants to do.
Meanwhile, the hot tactics of any given year have a half-life measured in months. Guest posting for links. Private blog networks. Parasite SEO. AI content at scale. Each one works until it doesn't. Each one is anti-Lindy, destined for obsolescence.
The Lindy Effect tells us exactly what SEO strategy to adopt: the boring one. The one that's been working forever. The one that doesn't feel like a hack because it isn't one.
Goodhart's Law and the Death of Metrics
Here's another concept from outside SEO that explains what I'm seeing: Goodhart's Law.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
This was originally about monetary policy, but it applies everywhere. Once people know they're being evaluated on a metric, they optimize for the metric rather than the underlying thing the metric was meant to measure.
Schools teach to the test. Companies manage to quarterly earnings. Athletes take performance-enhancing drugs. The metric improves while the thing it was measuring degrades.
SEO is Goodhart's Law in action, industry-scale.
Google wants to rank helpful content. Helpful content tended to have certain characteristics: good structure, clear writing, authoritative sources, external links from other respected sites. Google measured these characteristics as proxies for helpfulness. SEOs identified the proxies and optimized for them. And now we have beautifully structured, clearly written, superficially authoritative content that utterly fails to help anyone with anything.
We optimized the metrics. We killed the meaning.
This is why I say SEO is alchemy. We're manipulating surface properties while missing the underlying reality. The alchemists thought they could transmute lead into gold by manipulating its appearance. We think we can transmute mediocre content into rankings by manipulating its signals. Same mistake, different century.
The Copernican Shift
Before Copernicus, astronomers put Earth at the center of the universe. This made calculating planetary movements incredibly complex. They needed epicycles upon epicycles, elaborate mathematical models to explain why planets seemed to move backward sometimes. The models worked, sort of, but they were byzantine and required constant adjustment.
Copernicus proposed something radical: what if Earth isn't the center? What if we orbit the Sun like everything else? Suddenly, all the complexity collapsed. Planetary movements made sense. The math simplified. Everything became clearer.
SEO needs its Copernican shift.
The current model puts rankings at the center. Everything orbits around the goal of ranking higher. We analyze what ranking pages have in common. We reverse-engineer Google's algorithm. We build complex models of what makes content rank. And we're constantly adding epicycles to explain why our predictions fail.
But what if rankings aren't the center?
What if we put user value at the center instead?
Suddenly everything simplifies. You don't need to guess what Google wants because Google wants what users want. You don't need to analyze ranking factors because the main ranking factor is usefulness. You don't need to build links because genuinely useful content attracts links naturally. You don't need to worry about algorithm updates because updates push toward rewarding usefulness.
The math simplifies. The epicycles disappear. Everything makes sense.
This isn't naive idealism. It's practical strategy. The sites I've seen achieve sustainable ranking success aren't the most optimized. They're the most useful. They're built by people who genuinely understand their users' problems and genuinely want to help solve them.
Optimization is a rounding error compared to genuine value creation.
The Paradox of Trying
Buddhism has this concept about desire: the more you want something, the more it eludes you. Happiness pursued directly becomes impossible to grasp. It arrives as a side effect of living well, not as a goal achieved through effort.
There's a psychological version too: the paradox of hedonism. If you make pleasure your primary aim, you become less capable of experiencing it. Pleasure comes from engagement with meaningful activities, not from pursuing pleasure itself.
I believe SEO has its own version of this paradox.
The more you try to rank, the less likely you are to rank. The more you optimize for Google, the less Google wants to rank you. The more you focus on SEO, the worse your SEO becomes.
This sounds mystical but it isn't. Here's the mechanism:
When you focus on ranking, you make decisions that optimize for search engines rather than users. You add keywords where they don't belong. You structure content for crawlers rather than readers. You build links instead of relationships. You create content that answers queries rather than content that helps people.
Google can detect all of this. Maybe not perfectly, but well enough. Content created for search engines feels different than content created for humans. The tells are subtle but pervasive. And Google is getting better at reading them every year.
Meanwhile, when you focus on users, you make decisions that happen to also be good for SEO. You write clearly because users need clarity, and clear writing is easier for Google to understand. You structure content logically because users need structure, and logical structure helps Google identify topics. You build your reputation in your industry because users trust authorities, and Google uses authority signals for ranking.
User focus produces SEO success as a byproduct. SEO focus produces neither users nor SEO success.
The best SEO strategy is to forget about SEO.
Why This Is Actually Good News
I know this all sounds depressing if you're an SEO professional. If everything we do is alchemy, what's left?
But here's the thing: the death of alchemy gave birth to chemistry. The dismissal of astrology enabled astronomy. The collapse of pre-scientific medicine created modern healthcare. Paradigm death is always followed by paradigm birth.
The death of SEO-as-alchemy creates space for something better.
What I've found is that the best "SEO" work doesn't look like SEO at all. It looks like:
- Deeply understanding what your users actually need
- Creating content that genuinely helps them get it
- Presenting that content as clearly and accessibly as possible
- Building real relationships with others in your field
- Letting quality work speak for itself over time
This is harder than technical SEO. You can't fake genuine helpfulness. You can't shortcut real understanding. You can't manufacture authentic relationships.
But it's also more sustainable, more defensible, and more satisfying. When your traffic comes from genuine value, algorithm updates don't scare you. When your links come from real relationships, you don't worry about penalties. When your content actually helps people, you can be proud of what you've built.
The irony is that this approach produces better SEO results than SEO. Not by trying to rank, but by deserving to rank. Not by optimizing signals, but by being signal-worthy.
What I Actually Do Now
I still call myself an SEO. The clients who hire me expect someone who understands search engines, and I do. I know how Google works better than most people. I can audit a site and identify technical issues that prevent crawling or indexing. I understand the signals Google looks at.
But my actual work has shifted completely.
I spend most of my time asking questions like: What does your user actually need to know? What would genuinely help them? What makes you actually qualified to help them? Why should anyone trust you? What would make this page something worth bookmarking?
I almost never talk about keywords anymore. I rarely discuss link building. I've stopped caring about most technical SEO factors because they just don't matter that much compared to the fundamentals.
When I optimize a title tag, I'm not thinking about keywords. I'm thinking about whether someone scanning search results would understand what this page offers and why they should click. When I improve page structure, I'm not thinking about header hierarchy for crawlers. I'm thinking about whether a human can scan this page and find what they need.
Everything good for users is good for Google. The reverse isn't true.
I've become an alchemist who stopped believing in transmutation and started studying actual chemistry. The work looks different. The results are better. And I sleep easier at night.
The Question That Changes Everything
If you take nothing else from this piece, take this question:
"Would I be proud of this page if Google didn't exist?"
If the answer is no, you're doing alchemy. You're manipulating signals rather than creating value. You're optimizing for a system rather than building something real.
If the answer is yes, you're doing chemistry. You're creating actual value that would exist regardless of how search engines work. You're building something that deserves to be found.
Google wants to surface content that deserves to be found. Every algorithm update moves in this direction. The entire multi-decade arc of Google's development is toward better identifying genuine value and filtering out manipulation.
You can fight this arc, constantly looking for new exploits as old ones are closed. This is exhausting, unstable work with a built-in expiration date.
Or you can align with this arc. Create genuine value. Present it clearly. Be patient. The algorithm will catch up to you.
Alchemy eventually became chemistry. Astrology became astronomy. Pre-scientific medicine became modern healthcare.
SEO is ready for its transformation. The question is whether you'll be part of the before or the after.
I know this take will be unpopular in many circles. An entire industry has been built on the premise that SEO is a technical discipline with technical solutions. Conferences, tools, agencies, courses, certifications, all of it depends on SEO being a real thing you can learn and practice.
And to be clear: there is technical knowledge that matters. Understanding how search engines crawl and index content is useful. Knowing how to diagnose technical problems is valuable. Being able to read and interpret search data is important.
But this technical knowledge is table stakes, not the game. It's necessary but nowhere near sufficient. The alchemists had sophisticated knowledge of chemical processes too. That knowledge didn't make transmutation possible.
The game is value creation. Always has been. The only thing that's changed is that Google has gotten good enough at identifying value that the shortcuts don't work anymore.
This is liberation, not defeat. We can stop chasing algorithm updates. Stop worrying about ranking factors. Stop building elaborate models of what makes content rank. We can focus on the thing that actually matters: helping people.
That's not alchemy. That's just good work.
And good work, it turns out, ranks.
