Cool. 2005 again 😂
Back then, title mattered, headline mattered, your domain mattered. That’s it. Rank and bank.
Something changed since then.
But it’s not what you think. 😂
Actually, not that much changed since then. I know, many won’t agree.
The Content Myth
Before we move on we have to kind of ‘debunk’ a myth about content and agree on something, so we have a foundation of basics.
There’s a lot of obfuscation and confusion around content, how much it matters. It always was like that. Did it ever really matter? No (my opinion, you can have yours 🤓).
Everyone in the content game has his own interests. Google wants you to create great content, so they don’t show so much crap. Agencies want to sell highly ‘optimized’ pieces of content. As if they found Google’s algorithm on Github 😂
You don’t even have to run your own tests. You can see it in the SERPs, in plain sight. Content doesn’t matter, at least not as much as some people want us to believe.
The reason why sites rank
You can find hacked sites with just a proper title, headline and a bunch of keywords or scraped content. You can find newspaper sites, or other sites of trust and authority, ranking for big terms with just shitty content.
This means, after you did simple onpage SEO, it’s the domain that has the most impact on rankings. Otherwise, all that highly optimized content should outrank them with ease. But it doesn’t 😂
If you start nitpicking on my arguments now, go and spend your time somewhere else. Go sell content or buy Cody’s drafthorse, I don’t care.
So, to move on we have to agree that content doesn’t really matter that much when it comes to how well you rank.
This means, AI generated crap might be more pleasant to read for the human than some markov or whatever you use for some content, but it will not make you rank much better.
2005, we ranked and banked with that crap… without AI…
Ok, Ralf, come on… I have content to create, it’s 2023, what has changed since then?
It has nothing to do with Google 😂
The competition has changed.
In 2005, when you had such a list, like Cody’s, for most terms there was no competition. You just built the stuff and ranked.
Do a search for any of those terms shown. Everybody and his dog wants to rank there now. Even for the most shit terms you find plenty of competition. Hundreds, thousands if not tens of thousands of sites compete for the same term. Most do linkbuilding of course. So if your domain isn’t anything special, you will most likely end with zero traffic.
TL;DR
You knew it upfront, if something sounds too easy, too good…
Some additions:
And a little addition here I haven’t mentioned in my Tweet: Everyone has access to AI content. And what everyone has and everyone can do has only little value.
But, by all means, take advantage of this. AI content generation created massive opportunities. Maybe just don’t go the same way everyone else is doing.
I also like to add: Btw, this is not to smash Cody’s business. Even if I think his service is a little bit expensive 🥸, I think it has its value. And I like Cody’s entrepreneur mindset, just go and build something. 💪🦍😘