The Long-Tail Is Dead

A few thoughts:

- Building your business on the spelling foibles of end users seems neither white hat nor sustainable.

- Popular keywords: If I am searching for something really long-tail, like 'Mesopotamian cuisine, 9th century bc', Google can suggest 'mesothelioma' as much as they want, but it's not going to change what I'm searching for.

- Search mutation: If you're really delivering value on 3000 year-old Iraqi recipes (my previous straw man search example), having Google suggest some minor word changes shouldn't affect the likelihood of your SERPs showing up in my search.

Net net: (modulo some points around other Google verticals that I agree with) I think that the author is saying 'I can no longer make money building thinly veiled spam sites that trick your mother into clicking on ads.' Which makes me happy. Good riddance.

Yeah this is a misuse of the term "long tail" or at least the assumption that it only applies to "using long tail keywords to grey hat SEO my site". Offering genuine long tail content is not going anywhere, maybe spammy sites will tho, which benefits everyone.

Seems like what's bad for scammy SEO sites is good for the user.

The Long Tail has nothing to do with "misspelled Google searches", so the title is very misleading. The actual long tail is doing just fine.

I would take this much more seriously if it had been from patio11.

At present it mostly looks like a nice info graphic designed to get backlinks.