Maybe people are to harsh on the author for their writing style. They tell the reader that they don’t have experience in the field themselves but rather dipping a toe in the world that is SEO. I for one had no idea of the scale of the enterprise, figures they quote from years ago which make your jaw drop.
Obviously the people who work in SEO will make it sound like honest work. As long as there are search engines which got to have accurate results, there will be people trying to place their website above another one. High rolling SEO consultants probably aren’t that concerned with the content they are promoting though, just the fact that it gets promoted, raising ethical questions.
As of a some years ago, I too noticed a decline in quality from search results. The face that Mr. Sullivan made snide remarks about it actually improving made me frown pretty hard. Between displaying the same spam website multiple times under different urls, literal bait and switch scams and literally impossible to find niche shit sometimes. I’ve unironically used Bing more this year then ever in my life, but mainly DDG for a good 5 years.
SEO at least at one point was honest work. It generally involved ensuring that websites had a Google-friendly design and appropriate metadata so that it could be found via the right keywords. For example, for a place that made beer and wine in RandomVille and gives “wine tours”, you might have keywords including:
Beer brewer brewing randomville Arizoba distillery tourism hops wine tour vineyard drinking alcohol
For sites that had db-driven or forum-style content, it meant going from URI’s like
randomcatforum.com?cat=1&sub=22&post=9987
To something more like:
Randomcatforum.com/1-breeding/22-crossbreeds/9987-can_I_breed_my_maine_coon_with_a_skunk
This overall led to more legible search results when looking through one’s history as well.
At some point, it also helped push the adoption of SSL as a preferred protocol
Unfortunately, over time “SEO” has become less about making site results optimized and more about gaming search engines, either to gain clicks and ad impressions but also for spammy or scammy sites
