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Comment by breckenedge | Hacker News Reader

I had an opportunity to interview several SEO consultants and firms about six months ago after a disastrous (for us) Google update that put Reddit at the top of every results page. I didn’t get the sense any of them knew what they were actually doing then, instead it’s all just stumbling around applying yesterday’s “fixes” until something appears to work. And if you’re not Reddit, then you’re gonna lose anyway. The only solid advice seems to be Google’s own extensive documentation and meeting CWV.

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It's astonishing to me how many SEO consultants are still selling (and getting contracts for) 10-year-old advice.

It’s a lucrative industry if you can sell yourself - Google makes it a necessary industry by changing the algorithms every few months. There will always be a cohort of losers wanting to reclaim a coveted top-5 position. But the landscape has completely changed and that’s what I really liked about this article, it’s just going to take leadership a few more years to figure this out.

Of course the best advice we received was from folks who had recently worked at Google on search.

Absolutely. I attended a webinar yesterday on SEO/content marketing from a very well-known/established SEO "expert" and it was shockingly 101. However, one detail I did appreciate was hearing how long-term the standard inbound, organic content strategy is. Many have said this for years, but they showed some good data to really hammer home the point, folding in the reality that AI content farms make it all the more difficult. The other tiny detail that came up that was useful was seeing data emphasizing how counterproductive dating content is – the further away the present date is from the content, the least likely it is to be indexed and/or ranked. The advice I'd heard until this point was to update and republish content. This webinar showed data proving that publishing dateless content outperforms that approach.

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