SEO Twitter Is an Echo Chamber

Open Twitter. Search #SEO. You'll find:

"Content is king." "Focus on user intent." "Build quality backlinks." "E-E-A-T matters." "Don't forget technical SEO."

The same advice, reformatted into threads, carousels, and hot takes. The same 200 accounts liking and retweeting each other. The same conversations that happened in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and now.

Welcome to SEO Twitter, where the same ideas circle endlessly and everyone pretends they're insights.

The Engagement Factory

SEO Twitter isn't about sharing knowledge. It's about building personal brands.

The formula is simple: Take a basic SEO concept everyone knows. Reformat it into a numbered thread. Add some confidence. Post during peak hours. Engage with replies for 30 minutes to boost the algorithm.

Thread: "10 SEO tips that will 10x your traffic (most people don't know #7)"

Tip #7: "Make your content helpful."

Groundbreaking.

But it gets engagement. People retweet it because it makes them look smart to their followers. Those followers do the same. The thread goes viral. The author gains followers. Nobody learns anything new.

The Mutual Admiration Society

There's an unspoken agreement in SEO Twitter: I'll retweet your stuff if you retweet mine.

It creates this bizarre dynamic where everyone is constantly praising everyone else's "great insights" and "valuable contributions." Even when the content is surface-level rehashes of Google's own documentation.

"This thread is gold!" "So much value here!" "Everyone needs to read this!"

The thread in question: "Make sure your website is fast."

This mutual promotion inflates everyone's perceived authority. If all these other SEO people are praising this account, they must know what they're talking about. Except everyone is praising everyone, so the signal is meaningless.

The Actually Useful Stuff Gets Ignored

Here's the irony: genuinely novel insights get less engagement than generic advice.

A detailed technical analysis of how a specific algorithm update affected a specific type of site? 12 likes.

"Here's why content is still king in 2024" with a fire emoji? 1,200 likes.

The algorithm rewards broad appeal. Specific, technical, actually-useful content appeals to fewer people. So it gets less engagement. So it gets less visibility. So people stop posting it.

What survives is the lowest common denominator: advice so generic it applies to everyone and changes nothing.

The Expertise Inflation

SEO Twitter has a credentialing problem. Anyone can claim to be an SEO expert. Anyone can post threads. Anyone can gather followers.

I've seen accounts with 50K followers who have never ranked a site for anything competitive. Their expertise is in being good at Twitter, not being good at SEO.

But followers equal perceived authority. So their generic advice gets treated as expert insight. They get invited to podcasts. They speak at conferences. The snake eats its tail.

Meanwhile, people doing actual SEO work at real companies rarely have time to build Twitter followings. They're too busy, you know, doing SEO. So their voices are underrepresented.

The Drama Cycle

Every few weeks, SEO Twitter explodes over some drama:

Google changes something. Outrage for 48 hours. "Google is broken!" "SEO is dead!" Then everyone forgets and moves on.

Someone says something controversial. Quote tweets pile up. Takes on takes on takes. Then everyone forgets and moves on.

Two accounts beef with each other. Everyone takes sides. "I'm with [account A]!" "No, [account B] is right!" Then everyone forgets and moves on.

The drama generates engagement. It's content. It fills feeds. But it rarely produces anything useful. A week later, the same accounts are back to retweeting each other's generic threads.

The Real Conversations Happen Elsewhere

Want to know where actual SEO knowledge is shared? Not on public Twitter.

It's in private Slack groups. DM conversations. Paid communities. Calls between friends who trust each other.

Because the stuff that actually works is competitive advantage. Nobody's posting their real playbook in a public thread. They're posting the sanitized, generic version that sounds good but doesn't give away the secret sauce.

If a tactic is being widely shared on SEO Twitter, it's either basic enough that it's not a competitive edge, or it's already saturated to the point of diminishing returns.

The Opportunity Cost

Time spent scrolling SEO Twitter is time not spent doing SEO.

Reading another thread about "why helpful content matters" doesn't improve your skills. Running experiments does. Analyzing data does. Building sites does.

But scrolling feels productive. You're "keeping up with the industry." You're "learning from experts." Except you're mostly seeing the same recycled ideas presented with slightly different formatting.

The people who are really good at SEO spend their time doing SEO, not tweeting about SEO. The correlation between Twitter following and actual SEO skill is weak at best.

Breaking the Cycle

I'm not saying unfollow everyone and never look at SEO Twitter again. There are legitimately smart people sharing real insights. You just have to find them among the noise.

Look for specificity. Anyone can say "content is king." Fewer people can explain exactly why a specific type of content worked for a specific type of site in a specific situation.

Look for receipts. Show me the data. Show me the site. Show me the before and after. Vague claims are easy. Evidence is hard.

Look for disagreement. The best SEO thinkers don't just echo the consensus. They challenge it with reasoning and evidence.

And be skeptical of follower counts. Big following might mean good at Twitter. It doesn't mean good at SEO.

SEO Twitter is great for building a personal brand. It's mediocre for learning SEO. Don't confuse engagement with education.

The best way to get better at SEO is to do SEO. Twitter is, at best, a distraction from that.