SEO Myths

Raw Truths & How Not to Die

SEO operates within a beautiful contradiction: we're optimizing for an algorithm expressly designed to resist optimization. It's digital Sisyphus—pushing rocks up mountains that Google keeps redesigning to be steeper. After twenty years watching this dance, one truth emerges: the real game operates in shadows while the industry preaches by streetlight.

The rules have changed. Most haven't fucking noticed.

The Reality Check: Five Beautiful Contradictions

Google's Guidelines Are Strategic Misdirection
Google's documentation isn't instruction—it's crowd control. Their guidelines keep beginners compliant while the professionals reverse-engineer actual signals. The algorithm aims to reward what cannot be manipulated while simultaneously publishing documentation that trains you to build exactly what they can easily displace. SGE now dictates the real rules, not some blog post from 2019.

Most SEOs Are LARPing as Medieval Knights at a Renaissance Fair
They parrot trends rather than test them. The real players operate in silence, letting results speak instead of Twitter threads. AI has flooded the field with "experts" who've never ranked a fucking site. It's cosplay, not craftsmanship.

Technical SEO Isn't Link Building - It's Signal Manipulation
When lorem ipsum sites rank in competitive niches, it proves technical architecture overrides content fundamentals, exposing the gap between Google's guidelines and actual ranking factors. You'd be amazed how many "technical SEO" books aren't technical—they're basics dressed in complexity. Having a blink tag or animated Christ gif doesn't qualify as technical SEO.

Link Crawl Budget Concerns Are Overblown
Unless you manage a massive platform with 50,000+ research users and significant outbound spending, it's irrelevant. Google doesn't struggle to crawl modest sites regardless of what Mueller or others claim. The search engine allocates resources proportionally—your niche portfolio isn't taxing their infrastructure with real millions on the line.

Third-Party Metrics Are Zodiac Signs for Digital Marketers
DA, DR, and trust scores function as astrology—providing the illusion of measurement without correlation to actual business outcomes. "Our domain authority dropped three points!" has the same energy as "Mercury is in retrograde, that's why our conversions are down!" Revenue remains the only metric that matters.

The Honda Civic Story: Link Sellers in 2025

If you've got a bad ads guy, guaranteed there's a link team lurking. Remember that guy from high school?

Recently divorced. Drove a busted Honda Civic. Wore drooping cross earrings. Was the "DJ" at the local skate rink. And he's thirty-fucking-two. Called his side hustles "business ventures." Sold the worst weed—nothing but seeds and stems.

That's your agency link seller in 2025. Same energy, same results, same product he had in '96, same bullshit pitch. And just like back then, you're about to get played because you're too desperate to see the red flags.

The SEO Truth vs. The Ads Lie

SEO PPC
You own it. (Build once, runs forever) You rent it. (Stop paying → traffic vanishes)
Gets smarter over time. (Rankings compound) Resets every month. (Bid flip → start over)
Organic traffic is free traffic $50/lead, $200/sale and rising
Google's SGE is breaking your dishwasher while selling you dish insurance. The PPC guys are still charging $10,000/month to hand-wash dishes while the kitchen burns.

The Solution Stack: Three Pillars of Algorithmic Resistance

Architecture As Strategy
Structure equals strategy. Your website structure should resemble a well-designed city, not a random shantytown of content erected wherever you found space. SGE rewards entity-based clustering and logical information hierarchy. Most sites are the digital equivalent of Boston's street layout—historically explicable but practically insane.

Internal Linking As Power Distribution
This is website socialism in its purest form—redistributing authority from your strongest pages to your conversion assets. Backlinks capture headlines while internal links quietly transfer authority to pages that actually generate revenue. Your homepage is basically your site's trust fund baby—born rich, never worked a day in its life. Force it to share its inheritance.

Context Beats Copying Every Fucking Time
Your site. Your market. Your rules. AI-scraped content dies while unique insights survive. The algorithm increasingly rewards difference, not sameness. Generic AI content creates a perfect storm of mediocrity. Meanwhile, elite players leverage AI to scale proprietary insights rather than regurgitate what already exists.

The 2025 Warning Shot: Digital Darwinism

Google's SGE Is the Soviet Union of Information
They've effectively nationalized informational content. With 40% of queries now answered inline, Google has transformed from search engine to information redistribution engine. That "how to tie a tie" query you ranked for? Congratulations, it's been collectivized. Your organic farm now belongs to the algorithm.

AI Content = Oxygen (If You're Elite)
Google rewards brands + proprietary data while burying generic content. The divide isn't between AI and human content—it's between commodity information and unreproducible perspectives. It's not about who wrote it; it's about who could have written it.

Platform Leverage Is the New Backlink
YouTube, LinkedIn, and podcasts outrank traditional SEO signals. Build authority outside Google to win inside Google. The algorithm tracks how users interact with your brand across platforms, using engagement metrics as quality signals.

Three Ways to Not Die in 2025

Redirect 20% of ad spend into SEO
Turn top-performing ad copy into 10X landing pages that convert
Own the demand before Google
Build an email list, Discord, or app—where you control the relationship
Make ads work for YOU
Use PPC to test messaging, then scale what works organically
We'll still obsess over rankings. Still chase backlinks. Still run audits nobody reads.

But the brutal truth remains: Most sites just need better content, smarter structure, and relentless execution.

Everything else? Theater.

And theater, as always, sells better than truth. The beautiful contradiction of our entire industry.

Hi, I'm Simon Dodson and I'm the author of AI Marketing Innovation: The Beautiful.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​