How SEO Philosophy became fragmented and broken
A field guide to the seven factions responsible for the worst takes in digital marketing — and why your traffic disappeared while they were arguing.
Somewhere between 2020 and now, something went badly wrong with SEO advice. Traffic collapsed for thousands of websites. Reddit threads filled up with bewildered site owners watching their analytics fall off a cliff. And the internet’s response was to generate even more SEO advice — which is, if you think about it, a perfect metaphor for the whole problem.
The advice hasn’t just gotten worse. It’s gotten confidently worse. Authoritatively worse. Wrong-with-a-downloadable-checklist worse. And the reason isn’t that search got harder to understand — it’s that the people explaining it stopped being curious about whether they were right.
To understand why, you need to understand who’s talking. There are seven factions in SEO discourse, and most of them are lying to you. Not always on purpose. Some are lying to themselves.
A taxonomy of the problem
1. The Web Dev Crew
They fixed your Core Web Vitals score from 67 to 94 and are waiting for your traffic to triple. It has not tripled. They are confused. They have more audits ready.
2. The Content Writers
Formerly the most dangerous faction. Now mostly supervising AI tools that produce the same article they used to write, faster, for less money, and with the same results: a blog that ranks for nothing. They have feelings about this.
3. The PageRank Fan Bois
Every problem is a domain authority problem. Every solution is a link. They will build you a “white hat” link profile for $3,000/month and explain, with genuine conviction, why it isn’t working yet.
4. The Bloods (Blackhat)
At least they’re honest about what they’re doing. Points for clarity. They operate in a different moral universe, but they’ve mapped that universe in extraordinary detail, and some of what they know is actually true.
5. The Centrists
Like Central Jersey, this doesn’t exist. “I take a pragmatic, data-driven approach” is not an identity — it’s what someone says before they tell you something one of the other six factions taught them. The Centrist is always secretly loyal to a faction. Find the faction.
6. The Ivory Towers
They published a correlation study on 11 million URLs and found that pages with more words rank higher. Now they’re publishing a follow-up. Nobody has asked whether word count causes rankings or whether high-ranking pages just tend to be thorough. This question is not in the methodology.
7. The Snake Oilers
Probably the largest faction by headcount. The LinkedIn carousel crowd. They took something they did once — or read that someone did once — and turned it into a framework, then a course, then a coaching programme. The course works great. The SEO does not.
The thing nobody will say
Here’s what all seven factions have in common: they need the answer to be inside their expertise. The Web Dev needs it to be a technical problem. The Content Writer needs it to be a content problem. The Snake Oiler needs it to be solvable with the framework they already sell.
When your traffic dropped, none of them said “I don’t know.” They all said “I know exactly why, and also here’s how I can help.” This is not a coincidence. This is the business model.
The honest version — that Google has been making profound, sometimes incoherent changes to how it values content, that some of these changes are explicitly about keeping users inside Google’s own properties, and that the 2020–2024 period probably represents a structural shift rather than a correctable problem — doesn’t fit neatly into a service offering. So you rarely hear it.
And then there are the Refugees
There’s an eighth group worth naming. They built real businesses on organic search before 2020. They weren’t blackhat. They weren’t gaming anything. They wrote good content, earned real links, and watched it work — until it didn’t.
They’re the audience for most of the confident wrong advice floating around right now. They want an explanation. They’re going to get twelve of them, from all seven factions, each one wrong in a different direction.
If you’re one of them: the most useful thing you can do is get very good at identifying which faction is talking before you decide whether to believe them. Not because all advice is worthless — some isn’t — but because advice that comes from a predetermined conclusion is almost always worth less than the speaker thinks.
Demand to know how someone would test whether they were wrong. If they can’t answer that, you know which faction they’re in.
* The author has opinions on crawl budget that they are keeping to themselves for now.
