No ads, no SEO, just sharing information. By the beginning of the year, my only requests were bots. The only referrals were from someone on Reddit linking to a page.
I took it down. Google extracted the value of my work, they are doing the same to everyone else.
He even mentions the "Blogging Apocalypse" and follows with a downwardly sloped graph titled "bye bye traffic" with no units or further explanation.
I shortened my sentences. I used keywords that Google could identify easily. I wrote in a way that allowed Google to understand our content,[...] If I wanted people to find our article on Prague in a Google search I had to call it something Google understood. And then I had to repeat what the article was about in the first 100 words. And then do it again and again in the content. It led to some less than stellar paragraphs occasionally, [...]
I'm not positive about the new web either. I'm sure it'll be worse and surveillance will only increase.