Based on the hours spent developing and perfecting websites, it is perplexing that search engines list my (your?) sites near the end of an infinite scroll.
Currently it is estimated that there are 1.5 billion web sites across roughly 304 million unique domains. Only a minority of those are meaningfully active. Aggregators typically put the active website total near 220 million (about 15 percent). The rest are parked domains, placeholders, redirects, or unused hostname.
"A major flaw in how the internet is traditionally organized is that Search algorithms heavily favor “domain authority” — a metric that rewards old, massive, corporate, or government institutions simply because they have millions of links pointing to them. The unfortunate side effect is that many of those highly ranked sites are digital museums—unattended, sterile, and frozen in time."
SEO’s domain authority preference cripples the Internet of Things. Meta data -description, title etc. -seem archaic. A dynamic web should favor actively maintained sites with artistic, concise, and thoughtful current content. Hopefully here enters AI. Thoughts?
My TrumpetLessons.com gets a lot of traffic - I agree. My main TrumpetStudio.com does well because of content - but it’s surprising how much a domain name has pull…
Agree with the pull of a good url. Ingenuity is now required to discover new available domain names that are intuitive to searchers. Describing imagined content to AI prior to building a site and having the machine suggest available domain names is an approach; I have been surprised at the obscurity of its’ suggestions. (Note: Afternic alone features 23 million domain name listings for sale.)
Unless you are in a niche market or the searcher uses very very specific search terms I can’t see how anyone expects to see their site in search engine results when there are that many web sites.
I manage two accommodation websites in a very touristy town. I can do an internet search on specific terms and get on the first page of results but nobody is going to do that. If I use generic search terms I am up against some big players and have no idea where the results are, I am not scrolling that far. I can’t see AI changing anything for us, primarily because Trivago and booking .com etc seem to have everything sown up in this industry.
While I have basic SEO stuff going on as a hangover from RW I have given up worrying about it. Luckily I get ten emails a week from people wanting to improve my rankings even though they have clearly not looked at the website. The only advantage that AI searches might bring is you can forget about metatags and headings and all the SEO stuff and just hope that it picks up the content in the body, and perhaps any image titles you have. It should work out better but it pains me to say anything positive about AI. It is just as likely to get into your server and edit the text of your website based on instructions from one of your competitors.