Thread by @schachin

@curaffairs The author doesn't know enough about search to have written that article and the reason he's having those problems is AI algos like Rank Brain and Google's attempts to use natural language processing nothing to do with SEOs.

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@curaffairs YMYL is not evaluated at the site level, but the query level.

Again this is on Google, not SEOs because they want to surface better sites.

And those devaluations are part of Core Updates which SEOs like me recover sites from.

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@curaffairs Featured Snippets are not optimized for - you can use certain HTML to be pulled in one but there is no definite use case where Featured Snippets are shown or that your site's will show for it. Also doesn't always come from the #1 result.

& that's Google not the SEO.

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@curaffairs Also there are many times when an SEO doesn't want their site in the Featured Snippet cuz it doesn't result in a click to the website. But we have no control over what Google pulls as Feature Snippets except to put in a meta tag to exclude us from them

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@curaffairs And Neil Patel is not an SEO. Most senior level SEOs see him as nothing more than a scammer because reportedly he's ripped them off by stealing their content and articles and passing them off as his.

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@curaffairs I could go on and on about what's wrong with what's written, but the issue isn't "douchebag SEOs" it's because Google's moved to trying to understand language which means they're really good at data point search they call microments and really bad at informational search.

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@curaffairs Because Google works off entities now and they are mapped by mathematical relationship in a knowledge graph, if the relationship is weak they don't know what to pull back they add Rank Brain which is what happened in his search.

Again this is the failing of GOOGLE not SEOs.

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@curaffairs So this comment "Since the 1990s, SEO marketing has been a lucrative pursuit for the world’s most scruple-free douchebags." It's not without any merit there are unscrupulous douchebags like in any profession but you know what we really do?

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@curaffairs I live my life in the idea of search with the hopes of helping clients keep employees employed because if their websites take a dump on a Google update their people get fired.

An SEO stands between people getting hired and fired.

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@curaffairs And other times I help them fix their websites so that they can do better in Search & be seen.

Yes we optimize for the search engines but we're not doing something unscrupulous. That's like saying Ad Week is a bad actor because they help people do advertising well.

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@curaffairs If you want to be mad at the homogeny on Google then talk to Google because that's all on Google.

All SEOs do is follow their rules to help websites get better visibility because people don't go past page one.

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@curaffairs And while the seedy side of search engine optimization does exist, like in any profession, it has nothing to do with professional SEO.

We help site owners.
We help users get better sites.

We have ZERO to do with search homogeny. We don't make the rules. Google does.

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@curaffairs And finally your author should update their knowledge of SEO because it seemed to stop circa 2011-13. When we move from strings to things. He has demonstrated no understanding past that.

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