Depends on the context. I'm a long time dev/designer and part-time SEO person.
Back in the day (early to mid aughts) as an SEO person you really had to work to get your site noticed. You have to develop inbound links, create really good content, set your site up well for Google to index, used other resources like blogs and social media (when it was still in the early stages) to boost your positioning. In short, it was a full time, month-to-month job. The sites I worked on it was a constant battle to get a decent ranking and to maintain it.
But you are 100% right. Somewhere in the last 8-10 years, everything has gone from search engines really protecting who they put on the front page, to loading the page with tons of ads (half of the results above the fold are now all ads, followed by more ads below the 10th position) and making it insanely easy to manipulate Google and others to get your site on the front page.
Great example:
In 2019, I had a medical device company that was a startup. Out of the blue they called me because of my prior relationship with one of the founders parents and the site I built for her. They needed a site designed, built, optimized and 15 pages of content written in less than three months. I gave them some insane price and they didn't even balked and said if I got done sooner, they would send me a bonus.
I grabbed a template somewhere online, revamped the home page and the internal content pages and then proceeded to copy/paste content from other well known and not so well known sites in their industry. I did everything you should never do from an SEO standpoint. I figured it was a long shot, but worth the payoff. I got their site released on time, but the majority of the content was copied from other sites. Very little of it was original.
I figured it would get buried in the first month. Nope. #3 on the first page for various searches I targeted. It was outranking the sites I copied the content from, it was crazy. To this day, the site remains in the top three places on the first page of Google and other search engines for dozens of searches I targeted. It was outranking huge medical supply companies in the same industry - all as a startup.
That experience in 2019 was a huge wakeup call for me. It was blatantly obvious how easy it was to manipulate Google and other search engines. As of today, I have no idea if SEO is really a worthwhile pursuit any more considering how easy it is to do this. If I can do it, then I just assume everybody else is already doing it. If not, then they're missing out.
Back in the day (early to mid aughts) as an SEO person you really had to work to get your site noticed. You have to develop inbound links, create really good content, set your site up well for Google to index, used other resources like blogs and social media (when it was still in the early stages) to boost your positioning. In short, it was a full time, month-to-month job. The sites I worked on it was a constant battle to get a decent ranking and to maintain it.
But you are 100% right. Somewhere in the last 8-10 years, everything has gone from search engines really protecting who they put on the front page, to loading the page with tons of ads (half of the results above the fold are now all ads, followed by more ads below the 10th position) and making it insanely easy to manipulate Google and others to get your site on the front page.
Great example: In 2019, I had a medical device company that was a startup. Out of the blue they called me because of my prior relationship with one of the founders parents and the site I built for her. They needed a site designed, built, optimized and 15 pages of content written in less than three months. I gave them some insane price and they didn't even balked and said if I got done sooner, they would send me a bonus.
I grabbed a template somewhere online, revamped the home page and the internal content pages and then proceeded to copy/paste content from other well known and not so well known sites in their industry. I did everything you should never do from an SEO standpoint. I figured it was a long shot, but worth the payoff. I got their site released on time, but the majority of the content was copied from other sites. Very little of it was original.
I figured it would get buried in the first month. Nope. #3 on the first page for various searches I targeted. It was outranking the sites I copied the content from, it was crazy. To this day, the site remains in the top three places on the first page of Google and other search engines for dozens of searches I targeted. It was outranking huge medical supply companies in the same industry - all as a startup.
That experience in 2019 was a huge wakeup call for me. It was blatantly obvious how easy it was to manipulate Google and other search engines. As of today, I have no idea if SEO is really a worthwhile pursuit any more considering how easy it is to do this. If I can do it, then I just assume everybody else is already doing it. If not, then they're missing out.