It is interesting, most of the SEO nonsense is not because of Google, they say words to the effect of 'put the customer first and write for them' in their docs and that makes sense. Analytics will pick up content not keyword stuffed bulls4it for robots.

Just for the lols, put together a site with content, submit it to Google and see how many clicks you get. Nobody is going to beat a path to your door, even if you are selling 100% pure gold blocks for tuppence a kilo.

I could go on AWS and build a website in minutes from a CMS but in practice, even if you know you can do that, it actually takes a really long time to build and test a website. Even if you are not being held back by dysfuntional teamwork and can just do it all yourself, in your skill level, it will still take a while before that new website is actually working.

Even simple things like email. It probably just works fine out the box. But if you then decide you want a proper mail server, thinking how hard can it be?, then you will go down a rabbit hole. All you want to do is be able to communicate with people but you have to learn a mountain of stuff that you would not need to know if you just went with Squarespace.

Google have also been very bad at semantic elements. If you mark up your docs in divs and spans then that is fine as far as Google is concerned. It is what it looks like, not what it is. You would think they would like documents that use the more meaningful elements such as article, section, aside and so forth, but no.

Because of this we have search engines reverse engineering the structure and content of pages using mystery AI. Nobody is encouraged to do the equivalent of using 'styles' in Word and they are doing the equivalent of using Word as a typewriter, manually bolding headings rather than using a heading style.

We could have an army of highly literate SEO people essentially editing content to make it better for the customer, better organised with sensible HTML elements and with better English (or other language).

But instead we have an army of people who think that repeating words on a page will bump you up the search rankings, which is at the opportunity cost of not writing better content.

WYSIWYG editors are also evil, based on an outdated metaphor. They don't enable you to logically group your content with sections that start with a heading for the screen reader, the section scoping the relevance of the heading.

We all have a love hate relationship with Google, but, if you look at it objectively, they are not really taking the web in the direction Tim Berners Lee had in mind at that content level.

I have found that the few blogs that I do read now are like discovering the old web, but it is something you have to consciously remember to do. Google Reader and RSS really was the magic ticket for making it work, not to mention web rings...

The thing is that there was never any pressure to get RSS working. In a typical agency a decade ago there would be a grand effort to put these social network shares on everything to drive traffic but the people calling the shots on that never really got RSS and never made developers get that working nicely. It was not in the project spec but the silly Facebook/Pinterest/Tweet links had to be done.

Hence the demise is not just on Google, it is with the snake oil cargo cult SEO belief system that has no idea what the Google algorithm is, but they think they can second guess it better than any developer.

If you can't do then teach. If you can't teach then teach Geography. This was once a popular saying. Don't judge.

The modern take: if you can't code then do website design. If you can't do website design then do SEO.

A SEO person has the time to look at various Google dashboards and to make recommendations. For example, your TTFB is a bit high, can we have that lower? The programming team can then say 'what do you think we have been working on for the last six months?'.

Given where we have come, I would like to see a future where everyone hosts their own stuff. By default your home wifi is a server load balancer with sufficient oomph to hold anything you want to share. Out the box you just put in your URL and there you go. No need for AWS or others, your ISP puts your stuff on a CDN with your permissions. A soveriegn web.