Relevance of SEO in 2024?

 Having some technical experience within the digital marketing industry for some time now and a critical component that digital marketers should know is SEO.

For those who are new to SEO, S.E.O. is the acronym for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION.

Knowledge in SEO is important as it can be  helpful, however, the question arises, is SEO still relevant in 2024? 

Personally, these days, I find that many search results do not make the cut because search engines provide results of those who have a fat wallet. What I mean are the companies that are able to pay a lot of cash to simply rank their sites regardless of the quality of the content it contains. 

From an SEO perspective, the knowledge is that the more a site has links linking to it, the higher it ranks. One way of doing this is to place your site links on major sites (e.g. news, magazines, other popular sites), and this can effectively increase your site’s popularity especially if the site is still new and unknown. This process is called backlinking. 

The problem with this, is that many webmasters start gaming the system. Although unethical, it is not illegal. A word to match this definition would be black hat.

Anyway,  major search engines such as Google have countered these blackhat techiniques by providing critical search engine updates over the years. However, it seems that the updates aren't effective at all as Search engines have lost quality they used to provide because it more than likely that current search results will yield to the highest bidder. 

Just the other day, I was looking for a robot vacuum cleaner and I was taken to a review site that literally bombed my browser with ads. What happened to the major players like IROBOT or RoboRock and the other robot vacuum players??? 

This whole experience leads me to believe that ranking sites for targeted keywords can somehow be easily manipulated by those who have the money and the knowledge. Well, I guess that's just Capitalism.

To add to to this on a regional level, it seems that most of the top rankings you have for popular trending keywords in my area are ranking mediocre quality sites that do not provide the user with an answer or a solution. In many cases, a user and will miss my site and be brought to a review page that is loaded with heaps of useless information and ads. 

This whole unfair experience has definitely evolved how many internet users search the internet.I guess it's time to embrace artificial intelligence or A.I..

A.I. which has already altered how people search, actually provides decent answers in s straightforward simple manner. So instead of depending on search engines to find answers in a maze of ads, A.I. has given us an invaluable alternative to get a straightforward answer in a matter of seconds without having to visit a secondary site.

A.I. is showing a lot of promise despite it still being in its infancy but it sure is a platform that is a significant threat to how users can obtain knowledge from the internet. 

A.I. platforms such as ChatGPT are already changing how we use search the internet and they are making many of us less reliant on them.

A.I. in itself is not perfect, but they have already shown unbelievable promise in what they can do. A.I. has also proven, since late 2022, that internet users can obtain answers without having to see a single advertisement. Some skeptics say this will change but let's see. 

Overall, I am writing this blog without the help of AI. Actually I'm just free-writing for the sole purpose of experimenting if creating a dofollow backlink to a site for this particular keywords (茨城 ホームページ制作 and SEOとウェブマーケティング), still work. Why I'm doing this? I'm doing this because the current search results for the SERPs (as of  mid-2024) show mostly manipulated information by sites that pay other sites for backlinks to rank against other sites for a long time now.

 I have checked other site's metrics using Ahrefs and SemRush and yes, they are paying other sites to rank their sites. The manipulations of search results this has been hurting many potential clients and businesses needing honest and quality service from competent businesses, because these search results steer potential clients away from proven and experienced companies. I want to see if creating a few backlinks here blogger.com (a well-known High DA site) still work in this day and age. lol!

My hypothesis stands that it doesn’t matter anymore because anyone can black hat their way to rank if they pay.

I hope to be wrong but search engines have lost their moral ways and continue to succumb to economic influence. However, I remain highly optimistic that search engines, such as Google,  will wake up and change their overall strategy. Whatever happened to the old motto: “Don’t be evil.” ? 

It seems that evil is winning the game. Perhaps A.I. will be an effective tool to put an end to certain blackhat practices. The irony is, this blog is borderline black hat but at least it wasn't written by A.I. 

Here's the other version.