On: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)

[treyd]

It's functionally shackled by the terms Google lays out for it.

[runamuck → treyd]

Anecdotal: My hobby tech blog went from 4k hits/ day (all cold Google search traffic) w/ top Google searches in 2019 to about 60 a day today. I still publish at the same tempo and I believe I improved the quality of the blog, but I suspect these days the search engine traffic pushes eyeballs to the walled garden "social media" apps.

[raxxorraxor → runamuck]

You are no "authoritative" voice. What do you think was all the rage against misinformation about? To give legacy media and advertising customers an edge. All platforms with user voices and ratings were destroyed too. User opinions are bad for marketing.

If any search term is in any way part of any news cycle, you will get the crappiest search results you could imagine and any real content like a blog fitting the topic will be far down the line.

[j45 → runamuck]

I'm not sure why search engines would push there or where you are learning about seo, etc.

It seems search engines want to know it's real people behind content.

Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?

[Veuxdo → j45]

> Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?

It wouldn't do you any good. Social media sites will kill your post if it has a link in it. They don't want you leaving.

[runamuck → j45]

I post it to LinkedIn and X, but my logs show very little traffic from those sources.

[j45 → treyd]

If Google is relevant to it.

Google's relevance has been changing with alternate means to discovery (perplexity, chatgpt) than their search.