You can't spell awesome without SEO

While Google lives by its own rules and burns the businesses of others, the need for genius in the SEO field grows larger not smaller.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 14:53, 02 April 2026

Reading Google documentation sometimes feels rather like being the Medieval monk reading church teachings on purity while comparing the sentiments against the behaviour of the drunk, licentious, tax-farming bishop.

We refer, of course, to the developer guidelines telling us how to create helpful content. If what people are told to do has no resemblance to the things the people telling them what to do are actually doing themselves, then you might say you have a disconnect.

Just to remind ourselves of a little of what Google actually says regarding "Content and quality questions":

• Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
  
  
• Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?
  
  
• Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious?

It comes as little surprise to see these finely-tailored sentences smashed into oblivion by the frozen boulders of fact. If you cast your mind all the way back to 2024, Google invited a select group of content creators to meet with some of its top search minds for a "Web Creator Conversation" on how the two could better serve one another. Or so Google said, and I wrote about at the time. Recent events make assessments of that event all the more relevant to good SEO.

This week, in one of the strongest denunciations of what Mountain View actually does versus what it says I've yet seen, one of the attendees to the 2024 Web Creator Conversation, Mike Hardaker of the Mountain Weekly News posted about his disgust that nothing they had told Google was listened to.

Calling the whole exercise a "a masterclass in smoke and mirrors", Hardaker explained "We weren't invited there to provide solutions; we were invited there to be silenced. It was a pacification tactic to shut us up while they finished building a parasitic search engine that values Reddit threads and AI-generated "slop" over two decades of primary-source expertise.

"Google has a responsibility to the ecosystem that feeds it. Instead, they've chosen a path that rewards media conglomerates that pay writers pennies to 'spin' content, while independent publishers who actually invest in original photography and technical vetting are forced into layoffs and closure," Hardaker continued, while actually naming and shaming some real high-level Google operatives.

The Mountain Weekly News is a specialist site that tests and evaluates all manner of outdoor gear. Its tests are thorough (I say this as someone with more than a passing interest in thorough testing) and its writing is informative, good and lively, with quality original photography. For the area of interest it aims to serve, you couldn't do much better. It ticks all three of the above Google requirements, and easily exceeds them in my view. I would hazard that there are no more than 50 such outdoor specialist sites with a similar level of dedication to evaluation on the entire English-speaking web.

And Google have effed them over.

This week also brought the slightly unnerving news that the UK's Future Media, a specialist interest magazine publisher with over 170 brands such as Golf Monthly and Practical Caravan, had seen its market value continue a downward trajectory from the giddy heights of nearly £4bn in 2021 to "just" £267m today. Future blamed a 20% decline in search traffic from Google, a victim of "zero click" searches. 

Again, Future can hardly be said to publish trash, you simply cannot survive in the specialist market if you publish trash. Your audience is, by default, discerning and discerning in a way that those empty Google requirements above cannot adequately span, if they were ever meant to.

Set against the above examples, one might be used to hearing people entertain the thought: "Is there any point to SEO now?".

Yes there is, and those infernal blobs make the point for us, because what they say doesn't work. The valid craft and genius in SEO remains in extracting what does actually work, by observation and testing, and that importance is rising as the task becomes harder.

Even as Google smashes destructive waves across publishing, it creates ripples and vortexes it did not anticipate.

Those in the SEO world who are good at reading them do a great service to us all. It's hard to replace specialists.