SEO elder abuse

According to research by Neil Patel, 59.2% of traffic to blogs is driven by SEO. It’s the biggest single driver of traffic by far.

He also reports that your SEO decreases over time, if you’ve published a lot of posts that no longer get the traffic they once did – which describes every older blog.

In fact, Neil found that if your site is 10 or more years old, 44% percentage of the pages on your site could be considered “irrelevant” by search engines. The more irrelevant pages your site has, the more it suffers in search ranking.

In other words, Google doesn’t understand what makes for good publishing on the web.

What’s really happening here is that the 20-somethings who were influencing things at Google are now 40-somethings who have moved on to other jobs. The new crop of 20-somethings (at all tech companies) has never known a world where personal blogs and newsletters published some of the most relevant ideas and news, through user-controlled, non-algorithmic means.

It’s easy to assume that an archive of content that doesn’t get much traffic is irrelevant, but it’s quite a (lazy) leap to assume the entire site where that archive lives is irrelevant. It’s especially odd when you consider how selective this assumption is, since I doubt it would apply to Wikipedia, The Internet Archive, or IMDB – all of which have countless old pages that get few visits.

Most of my favorite blogs and newsletters are over 10 years old. Most of my favorites these days, regardless of age, publish frequently without regard to the size the post or the SEO hits they’re taking. They might publish one to five posts a day that range from one sentence to 10 paragraphs. They are usually experts in one thing but share everything they find interesting – just like the original blogs did back in the 1990s. They have massive archives that Google would find “irrelevant.”

These sites are invaluable to me.

They are of lesser value to Google, which makes Google less valuable to me.

The SEO experts recommend you prune your archives regularly to decrease your irrelevant pages. I think it’s a good idea to check back on your posts for broken links or missing images, but every veteran blogger and newsletter creator I know, would offer slightly different advice than the experts, such as:

• Don’t worry about what Google wants. It’ll change tomorrow. As will Google’s dominance.
• Post as much or as little as you want. It’s your place.
• Post whatever keeps you interested and publishing for the long term.
• Post whatever helps you build a stronger connection with your audience.
• Looking back at your archives helps you re-discover connections you’ve forgotten. It helps your readers do the same.

As AI eats more and more of Google’s search share, perhaps it’s the elder bloggers and newsletter publishers – with that imperfect stream of useful posts in their archive – who will stand out to audiences as relatable, trustworthy humans. Why would we give that up for an increasingly irrelevant search model?

– CJ

P.S. I’ve been away for longer than I wanted, but it’s because I’ve been writing too much. Although I can’t share who I’ve been writing for, I can share it’s been about the latest advances in AI. I am happy to report that the principles I posted two years ago for creating with AI have held true, especially 18 and 19.

P.P.S. The Newsletter Conference is back for its second year. Get your tickets before they sell out.

P.P.P.S. The Inbox Awards are still accepting applications for the next day or so for the inaugural newsletter awards. If you have a favorite newsletter to nominate, get it in there quick!

P.P.P.P.S. I made a few appearances on the Regarding Van Halen 3 podcast in the past year and I am scheduled to be on another episode in few weeks. Like the hosts, I’m fascinated by how creators bounce back (or don’t) from failures.