Is SEO Dead on 2022? A Developer’s Perspective.

SEO used to be a hot topic in the past but today that’s old, slow and boring. Let’s face it, you want to focus on solving problems and not on mindless tasks that you do for bots.

Seeing how powerful and viral memes like Gamestop, Doge, AMC can be makes you think — “OK this is the way to build my traffic and eventually this will translate into a brand that people talk about on internet. I can’t afford to wait a year for Google to pick up my hard work”. I won’t dismiss this as an idea and if you are a Roaring Kitty type then by all means keep doing what you’re doing. But remember, people today search more than ever and Google is still King.

Social may be sexy, but search still pays the bills
— Tom Pick

SEO is a pretty old and Google got a lot smarter over the years. Gone are the days when you had to tell Google about your content with meta tags. Before we dismiss it lets consider what has changed in Google’s algorithm in the past decade. There have been many updates but let’s look at some recent ones and the large core updates that are still significant today.

• Google Link Spam Algorithm Update, July 26, 2021. The goal of this algorithm is to “identify and nullify” link spam affecting sites with a lot of sponsored, affiliate and guest content [1]. Fighting spam has been a theme for updates that happened in 2021.
• Page Experience Update, June 15, 2021. This is the final update that include page speed as part of experience. Having web core vitals in check, pages served in HTTPS, mobile friendliness and avoiding interstitial marketing can help maintain or improve rank.
• Passage Indexing, Feb 10, 2021. With this update Google uses AI to identify and understand snippets so that it can answer questions immediately before presenting results.
• Mobile-First Index Roll-out, March 26, 2021. This update has to do with whether mobile users are able to quickly find what they are looking for in a page.
• E.A.T. Core Update, Jan 5, 2020. Google recommends that users pay attention to expertise, authority and trustworthiness of pages.
• BERT Update. October 21, 2019. This algorithm is Googles neural-network natural language processing. The gist of it: this is a pretty big deal because Google can now read and understand content using with newer and more expensive hardware it didn’t have before.
• “Fred” Update, 2017. Pages that make it difficult to differentiate between promoted content and actual content will get penalized. This update was a big deal for some who lost from 50–90% [2] of their traffic.
• RankBrain, 2015. One of the most important changes and 3rd most powerful signal today. This is Google using AI to understand user intent by observing their queries and response to them.
• Mobile Update, 2015. Here Google decided to penalize pages that are not mobile friendly. All platforms had to rush to get their pages ready. Whoever didn’t saw their traffic drop.
• Penguin Update, 2012. Very old but very important and often overlooked. Google analyzes backlink profile and using that determines whether your pages are spam or not.
• Panda Update, 2011. Very old but a significant one that penalizes weak content thats not useful, dupe content, too many ads. This is still pretty important today.

An SEO Tale

I am not an SEO agency and I’m not promoting that here. Why am I writing this? Well, I am a developer and I like building things and I had to focus on this over and over again. Also, I am a bit of an ego maniac and want to see how many reads this article gets. So if you like the article please like it, and connect with me if you like.

I’ve seen teams try to market their product and stumble. The project is about to fail and they continue to ignore #1 method of how people find content today: Search Engines!

If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist.
— Jimmy Wales

I’ll admit, I am one of the lucky ones to grow traffic to 200k page views a day with just SEO and by myself. But today I am doing the same thing again and seeing the same type of response by just repeating what I did the first time. I know that search has evolved over the past decade, but it appears PageRank still carries a lot of weight in how Google ranks your pages.

I get it, creating content, backlink building, researching keywords, it’s just not that sexy and takes time. Businesses today need aggressive growth to sustain themselves, and for most founders growing quickly has become a norm. So should you focus on SEO or not?

I think marketing a software product can be somewhat similar to investing in the stock market. You have bonds, which with today’s inflation rates are super unattractive, but you also got slightly riskier ETFs and the S&P500 that give you decent returns. Then you also have individual stocks or high risk funds that can yield much higher returns and growth, but you really need to know what you’re doing with them or you could lose half of your investment. I think SEO is kind of like buying bonds, but if you’re smart about it they could be ETFs or even S&P500. It takes time to build page authority [4] and domain authority [5], but if you’re consistent you will see improvement and eventually perpetual traffic.

On Page vs Off Page Optimization

For many people that aren’t very familiar with SEO I must point out that doing SEO is not installing Yoast plugin, updating your title tags and adding img alt tags. Yes, these things are important but in grand scheme of things thats as important as having well-formatted code that passes all your lint rules (if you’re a dev you know what I’m talking about).

There are two categories of search engine optimization. With On page optimization you are focusing on the your pages that you’re serving to internet. Things like building mobile-friendly pages seems wasteful when you have so many other priorities, but remember this is not about supporting mobile devices but ranking better. So this type of optimization means you want to follow some guidelines and this is discussed a lot so I won’t dwell about details:

• Good titles. You are creating catchy titles for your users and preferably ones that contain your keywords.
• The right density of targeted keywords. I wouldn’t stuff pages with keywords but maintaining a good ratio is still not old.
• Good internal linking structure. Just like when you design a city, is it easy to get to places from one part of town to another?
• SEO-friendly URLs. This does help a bit and also looks better when you see your pages on search results.
• Responsive design. Supporting mobile devices was big a few years ago, and multiple devices is still important today.
• Unique quality content. This goes without saying, quality is important and higher quality and lower volume is usually better than high volume of low quality.
• Structured data. This helps google understand your content better ¹. If you can implement this using schema.org it’s an edge you have against your competition.
• Fast loading pages: Most recently, Google penalizes slow pages so you your pages to render fast enough. If you can be on green side of Google PageSpeed you’ll get a few extra points.

This list can go on and on but I think next one is far more important.

Off Page Optimization and Backlinks

PageRank is one of the oldest algorithms at Google dating as far back as 1996. It carries most of the weight in ranking pages today, and if you don’t believe me you can double check this on most accurate website on earth, Wikipedia [6].

The gist of PageRank is that pages that have more links pointing to it are more relevant and therefore should rank higher. Well… it’s a bit more complicated than that, otherwise I can could create a dozen of web sites with many pages and add a few thousand links pointing to a my page. That would be a very artificial way of boosting the page rank and Google will obviously not allow that.

Google algorithm pays very close attention to over-optimization and anything that seems spamy and unnatural. While getting flagged as spammer happens, most often it will simply ignore anything unnatural. The example above won’t work because an external link that points to my page needs to contain some amount of “link juice” [7] that can be passed onto my page. This link juice is derived from a lot of different variables:

• Domain and page authority. This is a score developed by Moz that determines how authoritative is a domain or page and how well that ranks for the keywords that are in its own content.
• Age of domain. How old is the domain? As domains age their ranking power increases. This seems counter-intuitive but it makes sense in preventing malicious optimizers from registering domains purely for backlinks without providing any real value.
• Backlink profile. This is basically what is used to derive domain and page authority so in a way it’s the same thing. I think it matters to mention this separately because if a site with good backlink profile is linking to you it is passing you clean link juice that helps with your page rank. If site linking site has a very spamy backlink profile then any backlinks from there could actually backfire. Search engine marketers sometimes specifically disavow backlinks they they don’t want to be associated with. It’s debatable whether disavowing actually helps with traffic [8], but you can research it and just know that it’s actually a “thing”
• Outbound links and inbound links. the more outbound links a page has the less link juice it will have. Similarly, the more quality inbound links it has the more abundant is the link juice. This helps prevent link spam and link farms, which provide no real value to end users.
• How relevant is the content being linked. You will get the most out of a backlink if the pages that are linking to you have similar content. If your pages are about cryptocurrencies and your backlink is coming from a food blog then it’s probably not that relevant so less link juice will be passed on.
• dofollow links. many popular websites, like Reddit, intentionally add nofollow tags to instruct Google to not pass on any link juice. Among many other things they are strengthening their pages by not allowing any outbound links so this makes sense for them. You on the other hand need dofollow links for them to even count. I personally think there is still value in nofollow links as far as your brand is concerned and this could be used as a signal to Google, but I have no way of proving this. Hence, I wouldn’t invest much on acquiring nofollow links.

So my example of getting a dozen websites with many pages containing thousands of links is not going to work. You are better off trying to acquire one backlink that’s coming from a reputable website and reputable page that’s preferably related to your page in some way.

The people that are complaining that Google is dead are complaining about one thing: spam is dead. Short cuts are dead. Quick rankings are dead.
— Chris Lee

Another thing to consider is being consistent with how you acquire backlinks. It is much better to get 10 backlinks a day for the next few years than getting a ten thousand in a single day. Bursts can be okay considering that Google won’t crawl your pages every single day, but the more gradual the backlink building appears to Google, at any snapshot they take, the better. Building a system that takes this into account is a good idea especially if you are paying for these links — you want them to count!

Taking Organic Growth the the Fast Lane

One of the annoyances of organic growth is the fact that it takes a while. According to John Mueller’s answer to a crawling rate question he said:

“I think the hard part here is that we don’t crawl URLs with the same frequency all the time. So some URLs we will crawl daily. Some URLs maybe weekly. Other URLs every couple of months, maybe even every once half year or so.”

This seems discouraging, but keep in mind that the reason why Google is not crawling some pages as often has to do with their relevance. If you are working with a list of quality pages that receive a lot of backlinks, you can rest assured, your pages will be crawled often enough.

So now the question is, how do I take organic growth to the next level? You know… make things grow faster kind of thing! This one is tough, but important! I will list a few ideas in no particular order, and please be nice since some of them are pretty opinionated:

• Standard on Page-SEO. You might be able to cut a few corners but you need to get this done. At the very least try go over the most important ones. Your page titles, headings (in particular the h1), a good mix of your keywords in content as well as title and headline, a good URL structure, user friendly URLs, these are some pretty basic requirements and they are not that tough to get right.
• Mobile friendly pages. Your pages must be mobile friendly, even if you are not targeting mobile users. No exceptions.
• Your pages must load fast enough. One of the recent algorithm updates penalizes slow pages, so make sure your score is green or worst case orange for both, mobile and desktop. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see the score and what you can do to improve. Make use of CDN if you can, remove the bloat.
• Start writing. Position yourself as an expert and create content that is link-worthy (that is content that people will share or link to!). There is a saying: “If you look around and you see no sales team then you are it!”. You better start getting used to writing and if you want to scale that later that’s fine, but the best way to get this started is to do this yourself!
• Post Content in High DA Websites. Many approaches to doing this but generally you want to find domains that have high domain authority scores. Make sure your articles have dofollow links that link to your website. Nofollow links is not what you are after. Posting on TechCrunch or Forbes is obviously much better than posting in some random blog site. You will face a lot of resistance from higher profile websites. This is normal, they own their websites and naturally you have to offer them something for a backlink. In some cases, your content is enough. You can use Moz domain authority checker, or some others out there. (Full Disclosure, I worked for Moz in the past but I am definitely not promoting them. They along with SemRush and Ahrefs have some good tools you can use though).
• Connect with Journalists, Writers. If you want to be posting on higher profile sites then journalists and writers are almost gatekeepers to these websites. You need to connect with them, follow their work, and eventually ask them to publish something for you. There are tons of how-to guides on how to approach this and I’m not going to go in detail. Just know that it takes a lot of effort and persistence but one single backlink you make a hide difference in your link building.
• Keep producing content. I see many people have conversations about creating content and then life and other priorities happen and this kind of dies. It’s important to be consistent. Some articles work, some don’t, and some might work later. It’s possible that your content is being shared, talked about and Google is updating their relevance and you’ll find out 2 months later. If you didn’t do it, then it’s guaranteed that you won’t get any backlinks nor traffic.
• Pay Attention to Google’s Algorithm Changes. You want to be sure to be positioned well for next upcoming algorithm updates. I happened to be mobile ready when that major core update happened. Many competitors that were not mobile ready fell behind and I started outranking them! Page speed update is another one that’s fairly recent. These can be too important to ignore!
• Paid Links. Google discourages paid links and claims to even penalize for it. I haven’t heard of a case when they did this, and quite frankly I don’t think they are capable of knowing whether you are paying links or these are legit partnerships with other businesses. If you are facing a lot of resistance building links and want some backlink juice flowing to you then paying for dofollow links could be something you can consider. Other than the fact that this can be pretty capital intensive I think it is definitely a viable option. This could actually be a catalyst to your SEO efforts. In combination with other efforts it is how some websites that you never heard about climb the ladder and start appearing in your search results.
• Controversial Topics. Don’t be afraid of pissing people off. It’s a lot easier for people to ignore you when you’re nice to them. If you piss them off, they are now ready to engage and have a discussion. This can be about topics that you choose to write or, in general, how your product works. Facebook pissed a lot of people off when status updates started being broadcast and everyone was complaining about privacy. Mark simply apologized and got all that publicity, by these angry people and the media, for free basically. This works!
• Acquiring Old Websites and Pages. This is not so commonly talked about but it’s worth considering if you’re at that stage in your business where you have some cash to spend. If you find sites or pages that are relevant to you then they might be candidates for your to take over. The advantage of your doing this can be that you can do a full revamp and reroute all the traffic to you, but re-routing all the link juice is even more important. By doing this you are acquiring not just the old website but the entire backlink profile and domain authority that it has built over time. Domain age has an impact on the overall domain authority score so that’s another think that you’ll be getting!

Importance of Brand on Internet

I have read quite a bit on what John Mueller has to say and watched a lot of his Q&A sessions. He has terrific advice and I would encourage anyone to follow him. There are a few things that should be taken with a grain of salt though. Paid links is one of those things that he doesn’t recommend you do yet that is how internet works today; if you don’t pay advertisers with cash then you do an outreach, connect with others and get them to mention you, you work together with other website owners so they put a good word about you, and how are these not paid links?

I remember reading one of John’s responses where he says that comments in forums, blogs and generally the nofollow type of links don’t contribute as a signal to Google’s Algorithm (the link to this discussion escapes me but I’ll try to find it). This is probably true, however, does this mean that Google completely ignores social media activity, which consists of mainly nofollow links, which is what forums really are today? I kind of doubt it as they must be looking at that type of activity. So yes, for backlink building nofollow links are probably not useful, but if it’s about brand awareness then they probably are.

So should you consider brand awareness then even if that’s not helping with backlinks? It really depends how important your brand is to your business but if it is then I’d say yes. Also, even if you are not directly building backlinks you could be indirectly building backlinks that comes from all the mentions of your brand. This is definitely a long term play but I have seen it happen!

So is SEO dead in 2022?

Should you be doing it it all and if so how much? I am a software engineer and not a search engine marketer so our approach probably has differences. But I have worked with several marketers and have never heard from them that SEO and SEM are dead. In fact, there is an information explosion right now, there are dumpster fires everywhere. This is the a perfect time create new and useful content, spread information, educate.

There are definitely outliers that get that amazing viral growth that make all other efforts seem worthless. One thing to keep in mind though is that you still need to be out there constantly creating some content, even if it’s a sales pitch, for some of it to stick. Roaring kitty made history [9] with GameStop, but remember that he was creating hours and hours of video content before that, had tons of activity in several social media channels and his viewers were hooked. That probably took some hard work, trial and error, resilience and most importantly passion for what he was doing.

My 2¢ 🎤⏬

References

1. History of Google Algorithm Updates — https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/
2. Google’s Fred Update — https://searchengineland.com/googles-fred-update-hit-low-value-content-sites-aimed-revenue-helping-users-271165
3. Schema.org markup — https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data
4. Page Authority — https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority
5. Domain Authority — https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
6. PageRank — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
7. What is Link Juice — https://www.woorank.com/en/edu/seo-guides/link-juice
8. When to disavow links — https://moz.com/blog/when-to-disavow-links
9. This story is so much bigger than me — https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/gamestop-roaring-kitty-keith-gill-b1794857.html