How do you feel things have changed on the internet especially SEO?

[Marko]

With over 10 years of experience, I have a feeling that it's taking more than 1 month for Google to start "liking" a domain and send good traffic, I feel like there's a 'sandbox' of at least a month. Things don't happen as fast as they did in 2008 or 2012, they put a delay on everything from indexing to valuing backlinks.

I'm talking from the position of someone that gets all the very good backlinks for the sites, there's a delay even when you do all things right. In a way, I feel like it's good because it takes out the impatient that can't go the long run.

Based on your experience, how do you feel things have changed? What minor or major changes do you observe compared to years ago? Thanks

 

[Klayne]

I would say, that in the past you had to be a good SEO (or knowledge of just SEO was enough) to make a lot of money through SEO.

Nowadays you have to be good at more things.

Knowledge of most marketing basics is more important.

Understanding of good website design/UX is more important.

Quality content and a better understanding of how to satisfy an users intent and solve their pain points is important.

What I'm getting at is that you have to be a marketer with SEO expertise, instead of just being an SEO.

You still can rank with shitty websites, bad content etc but it's much harder. It's easier to just create a good website, that provides value and users like, and use SEO as an additional channel that you optimize, instead of the single focus.

As there are more rankings factors, and google is getting better at recognizing them. On top of that, good marketing of a website will get you the signals, that google wants to see (backlinks, good user metrics, social signals, brand mentions, etc.)

You have to look at the "why". Why does google value good content, good backlinks, good user metrics. Stop focusing on only what's the next loophole in the algorithm, and instead of look at the "why", and you will know why they do what they do, and you can better predict what they are going to do next.

 

[Ryuzaki]

It feels paradoxical to me.

On one hand, Google has ran off most of the scumbags and spammers and is keeping them out of the game for the most part, through time-based throttling and offline filters that run frequently enough that they never get past the time threshold.

And like Klayne said above, the industry has matured to the point where sub-specializations are more prevalent. You now have Technical SEO's, On-Page Experts, Link Builders, Page Speed Specialists, blah blah. It's hard to be an expert on all of those if you haven't been in the game for 15 years+ like many of us have.

So yeah, on this one hand, the sheer amount of knowledge needed has exploded... to really know what you're talking about and doing, you need to have a galaxy brain.

On the other hand, it's dead simple. All you have to do is install Wordpress, avoid plugins, and publish good content with basic on-page, and then do marketing and get links by just being in communities like forums, Reddit, social media, etc.

If you get a decent hosting package, install Wordpress and a basic theme, and don't tinker with crap, you're good to go with Technical SEO and Page Speed. Basic On-Page is simple, and getting links is a lot easier than people want you to believe.

So on one hand it's incredibly complex and on the other hand any old dummy can succeed. The barriers to entry are basically not self-sabotaging yourself by thinking it's harder than it is, and being patient in a way that most sane people aren't. Those are good barriers, especially the 2nd one.

 

[secretagentdad]

I mostly sell tools for marketers so I've gotten to see a lot of people experience this industry over the years.
Don't get why everyone is so negative about the industry shifting towards being more of a comparative content making rat race.
Ranking with dumb ass link spam was and is lame.
I think i its a good thing Google is finally making progress on removing the incentives to be trashy.

I think the big winners over the last 10 years were the doers. The guys that do their own html, write their own content, record their own video ect ect. They don’t get caught up in the comparative trap zones where you gotta out benchmark everyone and do ridiculous monkey dance sequences some crapidarians on Twitter circle jerked into existence.

Yeah they've got a bit of a platform lock problem but they're still winning.

Most of them work way less than the grinders you meet on forums and at stupid people conferences.
Somehow google seems to be improving at picking them out and promoting them.

The funny thing is they all lurk forums. If you actually get out of the house and meet people succeeding in the industry you would be amazed how many top ranking guys are regular lurkers here.
High integrity ops generate a lot of wealth for lurkers even from just honestly documented failures.

On the other hand, it's dead simple. All you have to do is install Wordpress, avoid plugins, and publish good content with basic on-page, and then do marketing and get links by just being in communities like forums, Reddit, social media, etc.

If you get a decent hosting package, install Wordpress and a basic theme, and don't tinker with crap, you're good to go with Technical SEO and Page Speed. Basic On-Page is simple, and getting links is a lot easier than people want you to believe.

This is troothin. Really agree.

At the same time.

Dunno why you like memeing wp so much.

Less common the cms, the less weird hacker problems and the better the classes you can qualify for in the machine learning cleaned and organized indexes era.

 

[tyealia]

Negatives
- Top organic results traffic has dropped greatly, Remember when page one of google just had two ads? Well now for some querys there is no organic results above the fold.
- Longer sandboxes and time to rank, slow indexing.
- Authority has become a big issue, if your not forbes or the new york times your going to have to work a lot harder than them to rank with anything thats not long tail

Positives
- Barriers to entry have dropped greatly. Pagebuilders are amazing now its extremely easy to build a website. and optimize page speed with tools
- Google is showing its hand. Google has begun to use its machine learning to make results super predictable with less reliance on links, this means its easier to predict exactly what they want in results using tools like surfer, pop, etc.
- no longer competing with people nuking their sites with gsa and automation