Antifragile SEO and the (Mis)Behavior of Traffic
What do you see here? Can you spot any similarities?

https://imgur.com/a/tbQBqAm

I was working on a customer's website that had been affected by the HCU as well as some technical mistakes. As a result, his website traffic tanked. We helped his website recover, but this led me to think about extreme events in the context of SEO.

SEO is complex. So complex, in fact, that the goals Google sets for its SERPs often diverge from the outcomes.

The graphs above show that the patterns in organic traffic and the financial markets share the same type of randomness, what Mandelbrot dubbed 'fractally wild randomness'. In the first graph, you see the impact of Google updates on the organic traffic of a website. In the second graph, you see the impact of recessions on SP500 price.

Organic traffic and the price of financial securities are volatile & share interesting properties. In finance, extreme events can be stock market crashes. In SEO, they're core algorithm updates. Either can make you extremely better or worse off. The impact is usually catastrophic.

Post-HCU, my site began outperforming established authorities, despite our lesser investment in content, a slow site and a mediocre backlink profile. This isn't to undermine the importance of technical quality and backlinks, but rather to show the edge you get when you 'hedge' your website against future updates.

Imagine working on your website, investing time and resources, trying to write useful content with search optimization in mind. Then, your traffic tanks after the new update. Before you recover, you're losing potential customers and underachieving your business goals, despite the work you put in.

So, how to prepare for the next core update?

One way to hedge against algorithm updates is branding. The more branded queries your website gets, the more robust your traffic is to future updates. If users search for your brand in particular and Google doesn't show them your website in SERPs, that's a terrible user experience; Google will avoid that. Branding requires building an audience outside of Google: on social media, YouTube, and online forums.

Let's say you're in the online communities niche, competing against Starter Story or Smallbets. Unless you try to increase the proportion of branded traffic to your website, you're vulnerable. Your competitors are robust because their traffic will most likely withstand the new algo even if they don't work on SEO and publish worse content than you.

Branding merely makes you robust, but what makes you antifragile? What strategy can help your website get an upside from a new update?

Antifragile SEO will require another series of long posts, but there's one thing that matters now: AI content tools democratize access to publishing hundreds of AI-generated pages. Crawling the sheer amount of pages competing for the same keywords & queries will be a very expensive task for Google. Most of the content will be more or less similar.

If most of the pages are generated by AI, small details will be more important than ever. Content quality compounds; if you improve each of your 500 pages by 0.1%, the overall quality of the website (in Google's eyes) will skyrocket.

That being said, now is the time to start building your brand (or hire a competent SEO).