The formalization of the farewell to the old times

[shammis606]

If you, like me, have been doing SEO for more than 10 years, you probably have fond memories of the “good old days.” The golden age when we could boast of outsmarting Google to rank first.

Google was less sophisticated back then.

Like the Joker and Batman, we play the seemingly endless game of cat and engineer database mouse, finding creative ways to "cheat the system" or interpret Google's rules to our advantage.

Back then we could get top rankings on the results page, but in reality, the end user (the real human being who was searching for the content we wanted to rank) was just a secondary piece of data.

I must confess that I am guilty of that too.

In 2012, before I founded Rock Content, my blog had over 1.3 million sessions. I was publishing over 1,000 articles per month.

The quality of these articles was questionable. I had multiple variations of a single " How to Fry an Egg " tutorial, all of them over 500 words long... I'm not proud of that.

Things are very different now. Let's see what has changed since then!

The not-so-secret hidden agenda: what Google has been telling us all along
For decades, SEO practices have been heavily influenced by a strong focus on outsmarting bots, creating hacks, and complex formulas for success . Before 2011, all of that was possible because Google wasn’t “very smart.”

Over time, Google proved us wrong. In fact, it had become very smart, and every time it updated its algorithms, there was a not-at-all-subtle message between the lines:

— Ignore me. Focus on the human connection —.

Take a moment to step back from the granular details and look at the bigger picture of the most prolific updates to the core of this search engine. Let’s decode what it was actually telling us:

2011: Google told us to prioritize rich, valuable content with the launch of Panda.
2012: Google told us to stop using keyword stuffing and artificial backlink strategies with the launch of Penguin.
2013: Google told us to consider user search intent with the launch of Hummingbird.
2014: Google told us to think about people locally with the launch of Pigeon.
2015: Google told us to go where users are and make sites mobile-friendly with the launch of Mobile.
2015: Google told us to better understand our users and make relevant content with the launch of RankBrain.
2017: Google told us to stop covering up customer-centric content with intrusive interstitial ads.
2018: Google told us to consider real user needs and questions when launching BERT.
For over a decade, we have been focusing on the details to trick the algorithm, but over time, we should have learned the current way to be good SEO professionals:

Ignore Google. Satisfy Users.

Looking back, it's no secret or surprise that Google was planning this all along.

The search engine is refining its understanding of human consciousness and transforming itself to be user-centric and human-centric. It too must adapt to survive, otherwise search results will no longer be valuable .

Google is forcing us all to move away from the technical details of algorithm updates and focus on the detailed needs of real people.

Ignore Google. Delight Users.

How to use EAT
EAT essentially determines the value of a website by the quality of its content, the authority of its authors, and the trustworthiness of the site.

Following current EAT best practices can mean the difference between top and bottom rankings in the SERPs.

This is especially important on Your Money, Your Life (YMYL) sites that reference content from financial, government, legal, shopping, health, security, and other websites with topics that could negatively impact quality of life.

All Google asks of us is that we create good content and that our online presence demonstrates that we are specialists in a specific subject.

Google doesn't provide a specific checklist of things to do, but some current best practices are:

provide a complete and accurate profile of the author with links to social profiles;
understand the user's intention to create relevant content;
get backlinks and media mentions;
correctly implement the HTTPS protocol;
have relevant and easily accessible information, such as an address, a privacy policy page, and a terms and conditions page.
These current best practices not only help inform EAT, but also have a visible impact on audience perception of your content and brand.

Old habits and techniques that only cared about Google's happiness are no longer relevant.

Changing the user experience
As it continues to think about the human experience, Google has begun to expect good websites to display quickly and properly on both desktop and mobile devices.

As with EAT, there is no list of good IT practices, the only secret is to change our mindset and try to think like our human visitors.

Fortunately, Google provides information to help you understand what to work on.

User Experience Update: How do I ensure a fast website?
Currently, user experience is primarily measured by Core Web Vitals , which can be found under User Experience in Google Search Console .

There you can monitor your site's performance based on how Google perceives it from a human perspective. This can serve as a guide to what to fix.

At this point, it doesn't matter how you solve these problems, as long as you have high scores in the " Good " category.

User Experience Update: To AMP or Not to AMP?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) are an easy way to optimize your mobile site experience. Enabling AMPs on your website can serve as a quick fix to give Google the perception of a fast and well-rendered website.

Implementing MPAs is a matter of choice, although a few years ago it seemed almost mandatory. MPAs were never — and still are not — required.

At Rock Content, for example, we have decided to stop using AMPs and invest in optimizing our website globally.

We have had no negative impact on our traffic, nothing changed for our visitors, and our website became much easier to manage without duplicate pages.

As with EAT, Google asked us to change our mindset: to achieve better results, we focus our attention on improving the user experience rather than just looking at the technology we are using .

As long as you get good scores on your Core Web Vitals, you'll be fine.

2022 and beyond
All the changes we have seen over the past two years have brought us to where we are now:

Ignore Google. Satisfy Users.

We've seen firsthand that when you put the user first, Google will find your value, regardless of the implementation method used.

With extremely advanced artificial intelligence already being used by Google, trying to fool it is futile.

What matters is the quality of your content's responses to user intent, in addition to an excellent user experience.

Case study
The proof of this change of mindset is in the cake recipe.

Practice cancelled: content created only around high-ranking keywords
We are no longer creating hundreds of the same posts about [frying eggs], each with a different colored egg, in an attempt to trick "good old Google."

The “old Google” is gone.

Google now knows that [brown eggs] and [white eggs] are both [eggs]; it will easily flag that content as spam. Keyword density is no longer the primary way to rank.

2022 Best Practices: Using EAT and Human-Centered UX to Create Meaningful Content
Rock Content set out to rank for a very specific core term when we created our business data post. That one term was [business data].

However, instead of ranking only for our main term, we ended up also ranking for intent terms and phrases that were completely different from our original plan.

This post ended up being one of the top three results for keyword phrases we didn’t expect to rank for, like [data for business] and [the value of data for business].

What happened?
Our team had created a solid article that answered a number of interconnected queries on a topic. The content helped answer readers’ deep questions.

Google, which now understands user intent, user experience, and topic queries, saw multiple high-quality markers on our site. It also recognized the answers to the multitude of queries on human-centric topics.

It's not just Google that's changed; we've also changed our definition of quality content.

The key conclusion
If you have to choose between all the green lights of your Yoast plugin within WordPress or clearer and more organized information for the user, don't hesitate: choose the user .

As marketers, we know much more about our prospects than a plugin with non-human rules.

Google thinks like a human being and we should do the same.

I don't mean to imply that we can completely ignore Google to do great SEO. Technical optimizations are key and we should continue to do them.

However, they are not the main driving force. We see technical improvements as a way to deliver what is most important – current content – ​​in the best possible way.

My prediction
2022 will be the first year in which it will be truly possible to do good SEO simply by thinking about the end user and leaving Google as an afterthought.

And that, my friend, is what good marketing is all about.

This article was originally published in Search Engine Journal's eBook " SEO Trends 2022 ". It's an amazing read, download it right now!