I Built Hundreds of Informational Websites. Then Google Stopped Wanting Them.
For years, I built informational websites. Not a few of them. Hundreds.
For years, I built informational websites.
Not a few of them. Hundreds.
Some were fairly small niche sites. Others had a lot of content that we spent real time researching, writing, designing and maintaining.
Most weren't businesses themselves. I used them to help promote clients.
And for a long time, they worked.
Then they didn't.
Google changed what it wanted in its search results, and a huge number of those sites gradually became useless for the purpose I had built them for.
That sucked.
Not because I woke up one morning and some giant stream of passive income had disappeared. That wasn't really the model.
It sucked because I had years of work sitting there that no longer did much of anything.
I don't think we did anything particularly wrong
This is where people like to rewrite history.
Something stops working and suddenly everyone explains why it was obviously a bad idea all along.
I don't buy that.
Those sites worked because the search environment at the time rewarded them. We built useful content, Google ranked it, people found it, and it helped our clients.
That was a perfectly rational thing to do.
Then the environment changed.
I've been doing this long enough to have watched that happen more than once.
Something can work very well without being permanent.
That's a distinction I think marketers forget.
Google used to be a much simpler proposition
There was a time when the strategy for a lot of businesses was almost embarrassingly straightforward.
Figure out what your customers search for.
Build the right pages.
Get them onto page one of Google.
If you could get to number one, even better.
Leads tended to follow.
That world hasn't completely disappeared, but it has fractured.
Today a number-one organic ranking might be sitting underneath ads, Maps results, shopping results, an AI answer and God knows what else Google decides to put above it next week.
Meanwhile people are finding businesses through Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, ChatGPT, Bing, Maps and other places that weren't nearly as important to us before.
So we changed too.
We put more effort into brands. We started doing more video. We paid more attention to local search, social distribution, niche content and the places outside traditional Google results where people might actually discover a business.
That's not because SEO suddenly became worthless.
It didn't.
Google still matters enormously.
It's just no longer the entire answer.
This is part of why I'm cautious about AI search
Right now there are a lot of people who seem remarkably certain that they know how businesses should "rank in ChatGPT" or optimize themselves for AI.
Maybe some of them do know something useful.
I'm certainly experimenting with it.
I'm looking at what sources language models use, how they understand companies and people, what information gets cited, and what seems to make an entity easier for a machine to understand.
But I've seen this movie before.
The tactics that work during the first few years of a new platform are not necessarily the tactics that will matter once the platform matures.
And before I tell a plumber that he needs to spend a bunch of money "getting into ChatGPT," I'd like to know something even more basic:
Are his customers actually looking for plumbers there?
The channel should follow the customer. Not the other way around.
There's another question I don't think we have answered yet
Google spent decades depending on other people to create the information it organized.
Publishers wrote articles. Businesses created useful pages. Hobbyists built websites. SEOs, whether Google liked us or not, had a financial incentive to put an enormous amount of information onto the web.
Now Google and AI companies increasingly want to answer the question themselves.
Fine.
But if fewer people can make money creating the source material, eventually you have to ask:
Who is going to keep creating it?
Maybe the answer is that the economics of publishing simply change.
Maybe large trusted publishers dominate.
Maybe new models appear that I haven't thought of.
I don't know.
And I think "I don't know" is still a perfectly reasonable answer here.
The lesson wasn't to stop doing SEO
The lesson for me was not that informational sites were stupid, SEO was a scam, or Google couldn't be trusted.
It was much simpler.
Don't confuse something that works right now with a law of nature.
I had hundreds of websites to remind me of that.
I'd prefer not to pay for the same lesson twice.