I’ve been practicing SEO for over a decade, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that SEO has evolved into a guessing game. Back in the day, two things were certain: blasting backlinks worked in the short term, and content was king. It was like the Wild West for Google—bots would devour any article you could back with thousands of backlinks using tools like Senuke. If you had your own Private Blog Network (PBN), you were golden. But fast forward to today…
Nowadays, especially for local SEO, Google is hyper-personalized. They practically read your emails and track your every move online, Big Brother-style. If you run a local mom-and-pop shop, you’d better hope you’re nearby when someone searches, and that Google—now doing the thinking for us—deems you worthy of appearing on page 1, 2, 3, or somewhere far down the rabbit hole.
For national and global search results, it’s a different ballgame. The Home Depots, Wal-Marts, and other big household names dominate the space, along with platforms like Yelp and even Reddit on occasion. Competing here? Forget it. You probably don’t have the ad budget to keep up with Google’s demands.
A quick browse through SEO forums and subreddits reveals the chaos: some say directory listings are essential in 2024, while others claim they’re obsolete. Everyone seems to have their own method for ranking websites, and the kicker? They all claim to be successful. They can’t all be right… can they?
There’s no common denominator in SEO anymore. Some people avoid backlinking altogether, citing Google’s TOS, while others go full throttle, trying to game the system like Russian hackers. Both groups claim success. Who’s telling the truth? Who knows? SEO has become like a religion—everyone’s dogma is different, yet each claims their way leads to salvation. And who’s to say they’re wrong?
And let’s be real: in the age of AI, content is no longer king. Just look at any SERP today. Most results start with Google Gemini’s own answer, followed by a link to a pre-approved website where the wording is eerily similar. But this is just the beginning. Google doesn’t want to be the gateway to your search; they want to be the final destination. Soon, your “plumber near me” search might yield nothing but ad results and AI-generated answers.
Google Maps remains one of the few sanctuaries yet to fall completely under Google’s control—at least for now. But even that’s just my personal experience. For some, Maps might be just as unreliable. And that’s the crux of the issue: there’s no consistency with Google. Without consistency, there’s no clear path to success. Results are random, influenced by geolocation and online history. If they weren’t, why would everyone in this community have a different success story?