You Are a Story, Not a Synopsis
Travel Lemming founder and CEO Nate Hake recently posted about the catastrophic effect on small business web traffic created by Google's alterations to its search algorithms and policies.
The upshot for me (and for those who skim posts) is that grassroots networking and iconoclastic self-expression are more important than ever for writers, editors, and entrepreneurs of many stripes.
I encourage folks to read the above blog post, whether you are an editor, an indie writer, or any sort of website owner who worries about web traffic. The piece is kind of long (no shade to Mr. Hake, who undertook the impressive feat of condensing a 34-page letter to the FTC, which surely had to be very detailed), and some parts of may feel to some like old news, but I think the article provides a foundation of helpful evidence for things that many have probably noticed but maybe can't put a finger on.
More importantly, it may help you to explore what is really worth spending (or wasting) your time on.
Here's a synopsis. Hake reports, from the front row of the devolution, the latest phase of precipitous decline in what we used to call the open web. He specifically suggests, with citations, graphs, and personal testimony from his interactions with Google staff, that Google is hastening this decline on purpose. And he offers numerous constructive actions people can take: change your search engine; visit sites directly rather than stopping at the search results; de-Googlefy, tell your story, for example. What will come of these efforts remains to be seen; we are in David and Goliath territory, here.
Body blow one in his report seems to be an ever-narrower definition of what constitutes a relevant result. In other words, as Hake puts it, the websites of many relatively small players (maybe you are one of them?) have now been shadow banned from appearing in Google search results. This is apparently due to a new definition Google has given to relevance. The second punch is the growing prominence of AI-borrowed (stolen?) answers as a replacement for sending people to your site.
In other words, Google's goal (in Hake's analysis) is to keep people as much as possible on Google, never leaving to go elsewhere in our increasingly inaccessible, increasingly finite virtual universe. If you are lucky, you might escape Google to visit the manor of one of the few sites which already possess enormous cachet and which maybe have special agreements with Google (or you'll find a crappy content farm, but I won't get into that).
As I reflect on Hake’s report, I’d like to return in a general way the actions he suggests that people take to respond to this state of affairs. And as I do so
I return to the fierce debate I have had with myself all my life over how much I ought to play by the rules and how much I ought to make up my own game.
It strikes me for the thousandth time that I place too much faith in the idea that there is a shared set of rules binding all players or a rational, discoverable strategy for winning the game or even just playing well. The goal posts have a suspicious tendency to appear in a different, more distant position every day, and the sporting equipment seems to be ever-more-disproportionately distributed every time I step onto the field.
For example, for the first time today I encountered the term GEO – Generative Engine Optimization. My immediate reaction was a little bit like Rob Gordon in High Fidelity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM2-f8uQoeM. Then I asked myself which anonymous venture capitalist decided that this will be the new SEO rabbit which we will all chase around the track like greyhounds. Then I thought, however much I hate this, I give the inventors of GEO props for creating a brilliant distraction. The newest iteration of web optimization will prevent many from wondering why traffic to their website has dwindled because it will instead preoccupy them with fixing yet another problem that someone else created.
And GEO, like AI, will surely keep many from asking something truly disruptive to the disruption market: "How much does any of this properly matter to my life and my goals?"
Have you ever told a joke to someone, or providing them with a helpful piece of advice, and then later watched that person repeat your words to someone else (perhaps many someones) and take the credit? I certainly hope you would gently question my sanity if I continually spent time and money trying to gain the attention and favor of such a person.
In that spirit, I'm taking a moment away from the sound and fury of an internet that has been leveraged within an inch of its life to particular ends that are not mine in order to think about what I really want to accomplish, and what methods might be most fruitful for me to do what I want to do. At the same time, I'll put myself in the shoes of my clients and imagine what they might want to achieve.
For starters:
- I love engaging with people in the curious and creative process we call writing.
- I love to help make words clear, beautiful, compelling, and personal.
- I love to help writers discover deep and wide connections in their writing and in themselves that they may not have known were there.
- I love experimenting with how to improve the way people discover me and feel welcome to explore my professional, creative space; be that through my website, my brand, how and where I write, how I conduct myself one-on-one and in groups, and who knows how many other ways I haven't identified yet. Who knows, perhaps my path to flourishing lies in branding fruit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH-3x2-wYmM&t=56s).
When I put together the handful of puzzle pieces I currently possess, I realize that my struggle to come into my own as a businessperson is just one aspect of my pilgrimage to walk as me and not as a copy of someone else, and to communicate that "me" faithfully to myself and others. This bears a striking resemblance to the passion I witness in every writer who comes to me for help.
What does this all add up to? The fact that growing into bold self-possession seems to serve my clients far better than whether I win some GEO arms race.
None of this means that standards don't exist, or that advice is useless, or that change is poisonous, or that making certain compromises with the world at large is anathema to the individual. It would be a different sort of crazy if I, a disciple of all sorts of grammatical and stylistic sensibilities, announced that there were no longer any rules.
No, what I am talking about is the intent behind how such things are wielded and what effects they have. I am looking at what happens when advice, however well-intended it may have started out, mutates into institutional gaslighting or, more benign but just as damaging, becomes such a grind that it robs people of their compass and numbs them to their proper passions.
I strive to wield my editorial knowledge and insight to empower writers, not to discourage them or to drain their self-expression of the "self" part until it is a husk of optimized "expression." And I certainly never want to wield my editorial skills in order to exploit writers.
But this seems to be exactly how many of our would-be internet experts behave towards us. As a result, I am once again firing those experts, because I can't know what works best for me until I put some distance between me and the self-interested tech gurus shrieking in my ears.
I relish the thought that this whole journey is building in me not just conviction, not just refined skills, but credibility that I can offer as one more tool to support fellow creatives.
And this is one of the core messages I always want writers to know about themselves and their projects: your words matter because you matter, in a way only you can.
More and more, I can speak from lived experience every time I tell someone whom I'm helping, "I hear you and I see you, even if the world does not. What you are doing is wonderful. I put my faith and skills at your disposal. We will get there together. Listen: I am here for you. Got your treasure map?
“Let's get started."