My Content Revelation: Saying Goodbye to SEO

After several years slogging through the SEO quagmire, I have declared that it is dead, at least for me.

I will admit to spending way too much time over the course of my blogging life so amerced in how Google affected SEO that it literally became a blur.

After all, if you have to change things on your site every time google does an update, I think that means you are doing something wrong in the first place.

Here are a few questions I ask myself every time I visit the SEO bog.

• What is SEO?
• Are we dead in the swamp if Google does decide to change things?
• Does a well-written blog post that answers questions and provides value even need SEO?
• If it is worthy, won’t it be shared, shared and shared some more with an outcome even greater than that of any SEO efforts?

Many will argue that SEO is not dead. Ok, if SEO is still alive, then it must be really sick.

The real problem

Spam is crippling the good efforts of many bloggers legitimate efforts to provide valuable content to the ones that are searching for it. Spam is an evil entity that creeps out of the caves of hell every night while you sleep just to steal your blogging sole.

The sad thing is, spam must be working because it is still going strong.

Guest blogging used to be a great way to engage a new audience and provide valuable content to the blog owner.

But recently Matt Cutts commented on this topic and it wasn’t pretty.

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.”

- Matt Cutts “The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO

Now, the misuse of guest blogging alone is not the reason SEO is dead sick.

The other problem

There are thousands and thousands of SEO experts out there for hire. And every time I research them, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I picture a used car salesman in that quintessential seventies leisure suit trying to sell a lemon, after a while you lose trust.

Plus, ask a hundred different SEO experts a question on how to rank better in Google and expect a hundred different answers.

Yet another issue

To me, SEO has become a bad word and maybe we just need to call it something else.

Maybe call it,

• Inbound Online Marketing
• Digital Content Strategy
• Content Accessibility Strategy
• Google Buddy System

Or maybe Matt Cutts coined it best “SEO should mean search experience optimization.”

What can we do?

Don’t live and die with the Google updates and avoid falling prey to the inevitable changes. And there will be many more changes.

Look at some Google updates from the past few years and you can see where they are headed.

Panda update, what did it do?

• change is implemented in order to eliminate ‘low quality’ content
• eliminate spammy content for the sole purpose to rank in the search engines
• eliminate those publishers engaged in spammy content with no value
• eliminate content farms

Penguin update, what did it do?

• aggressively penalized sites that they believed engaged in link spam techniques
• caused some sites to fall out of the top ten for using their own brand name terms
• links from blog comments, forums or site footers may now be considered spammy.
• Penguin also focused on other offsite factors

To add to the updates, Google removed authorship on august 28, 2014. This may have taken away from some of the authority some had built over time.

Conclusion

It’s the end of SEO as we know it, stop stressing over it and create something of value with the reader in mind, not Google. So many bloggers are so focused on SEO that they forget the value of value.

I have decided that I am not going to think about SEO, I am just going to write what I love while sharing my experience. Let the cards fall where they may.

Oh, and I am going to use Google + to share more often than I have in the past. Remember, this is not search engine optimization it’s sharing my experience.

Are you fed up with SEO and trying new things? Let me know in the form below.

Creative Commons image by Duncan