I've been in web development and SEO for almost 20 years now.

When I first started out all the veterans of SEO kept telling me not to do this, don't do that with things that could get your site buried in the SERP's. At the time Google's algorithm was really good at ferreting out affiliate links, link farms and other nefarious black hat techniques SEO's used to game Google.

Now? Complete opposite. I have several freelance clients and I've used every dirty SEO trick in the book and all of them have worked like magic to get my clients sites ranked on page 1 or 2 of the SERP's.

I have no idea what changed, but Google is super easy to manipulate now to get your site or specific pages ranking really high. I haven't heard or seen any of the horror stories I read and people blogged about constantly when I first started out for years - which tells me they're all probably doing the same thing I am and not seeing any repercussions.

Maybe Google doesn't care because users have become so savvy, they can filter through a ton of garbage in minutes to find what they really want?

Do you have any writing on this? Would love to learn more.

I recently googled "rubbish removal mysuburb" and found a pretty good looking website. Let's say it was myrubbishremoval.com/mysuburb. The page text repeatedly named the suburb.

It turns out they appear to have a folder for basically every suburb in the country, thousands of subdirectories yielding the same looking page with that suburb name inserted into the text, making them look local no matter where you are. I can similarly find this with many other industries.

This sort of thing twenty years ago was a huge no no. Google talked about detecting mostly duplicate text and would bury you for it. Like a very basic rule was that if two pages were mostly the same only one would really rank.

Nowadays the "lead funnel" is an entire industry on websites following this pattern, and it clearly works.

Interesting because I've been under the assumption that this kind of "keyword stuffing" was cause issues with ranking so I've always wondered what some of these sites were doing "right"

Definitely I think the way we use the internet has changed profoundly. There are a lot of apps that provide useful information but they may not be made indexable by search engines. Much less useful information is simply out there on the open web, and much of it are locked behind logins. There were previous deals like Twitter sending a completely copy of all new tweets to Google, but these are basically dying.

It's especially interesting since you mentioned normalizing searches by the number of internet users. The country with the largest number of internet users is China, with more than 1 billion of them. And they don't have access to Google. And their local copycat, Baidu, is years behind Google in terms of technological sophistication and simultaneously years ahead of Google in terms of user hostility. So what do Internet users in China do in a post-search world? They simply open various apps and use the full text search feature of different apps. For general knowledge they might open ZhiHu and search there; for something resembling the old-time personal blogs by individual users they might open XiaoHongShu and search there; for short videos they might open Douyin and for long ones Bilibili. For reaching an organization be it a store or a museum or a hospital or a government department they might open WeChat and search there for an official account or mini program (a mini program is a website that uses WeChat APIs and can only be opened in WeChat).

I made these observations on a recent trip to China and it's clear to me what a post-search world looks like because China is already there.

> And their local copycat, Baidu, is years behind Google in terms of technological sophistication and simultaneously years ahead of Google in terms of user hostility.

Baidu search was fine during early days, issue as you hinted was PRC internet went mobile first and content got locked behind various platforms and made deliberately hard to scrape - crawling/indexing got locked much earlier than west. Hence now as more gets locked in west behind logins, western behaviours also shifting towards that model, how much of default search is query + wiki/reddit/youtube or straight into short video services like looking up recipes on XiaoHongShu. Reddit especially, simply because reddit app has horrible search experience. Also technically, Baidu rankdex predated Google PageRank which Larry Page referenced for Pagerank patents. Eitherway, depending on how ChatGPT copyright drama plays out, imo more people will just go the lazy route and have AI generate good enough summaries for most queries.

>I made these observations on a recent trip to China and it's clear to me what a post-search world looks like because China is already there.

You are talking like open web is dead but it's not. There are millions of blogs and personal sites out there. Walled gardens are user hostile and hungry for money, that's why enshittification[0] happens.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

The open web is not dead. Unfortunately it will be soon, where "soon" is roughly a decade or so. If you haven't seen the signs of it dying a slow death, you've been hiding under a rock. I totally agree with you about walled gardens and enshittification; but I see no way to stop them.

You have been using Google less.

Quick: If you want to search on what is the best toaster to buy, what URL do you type?

How do you find out the weather?

How do you find a local brewery in your area?

For me the first answer is Amazon. And the second is ask Siri. The third is Apple Maps.

Google is now below 50% of my search terms. Heck, I’m more likely to search Reddit for some queries.

Long-term stats are tricky because of how much of the landscape has changed. There's the desktop/mobile split, developing countries increasing their internet use, heavier use of apps, growth and decline of results getting indexed, and change in what we search for.