DEV Community: SIMON DODSON

Most SEOs are terrible at SEO. And that’s being kind…

SIMON DODSON — Sat, 24 May 2025 06:30:26 +0000

SEO Myths

Raw Truths & How Not to Die

SEO operates within a beautiful contradiction: we're optimizing for an algorithm expressly designed to resist optimization. It's digital Sisyphus—pushing rocks up mountains that Google keeps redesigning to be steeper. After twenty years watching this dance, one truth emerges: the real game operates in shadows while the industry preaches by streetlight.

The rules have changed. Most haven't fucking noticed.

The Reality Check: Five Beautiful Contradictions

Google's Guidelines Are Strategic Misdirection
Google's documentation isn't instruction—it's crowd control. Their guidelines keep beginners compliant while the professionals reverse-engineer actual signals. The algorithm aims to reward what cannot be manipulated while simultaneously publishing documentation that trains you to build exactly what they can easily displace. SGE now dictates the real rules, not some blog post from 2019.

Most SEOs Are LARPing as Medieval Knights at a Renaissance Fair
They parrot trends rather than test them. The real players operate in silence, letting results speak instead of Twitter threads. AI has flooded the field with "experts" who've never ranked a fucking site. It's cosplay, not craftsmanship.

Technical SEO Isn't Link Building - It's Signal Manipulation
When lorem ipsum sites rank in competitive niches, it proves technical architecture overrides content fundamentals, exposing the gap between Google's guidelines and actual ranking factors. You'd be amazed how many "technical SEO" books aren't technical—they're basics dressed in complexity. Having a blink tag or animated Christ gif doesn't qualify as technical SEO.

Link Crawl Budget Concerns Are Overblown
Unless you manage a massive platform with 50,000+ research users and significant outbound spending, it's irrelevant. Google doesn't struggle to crawl modest sites regardless of what Mueller or others claim. The search engine allocates resources proportionally—your niche portfolio isn't taxing their infrastructure with real millions on the line.

Third-Party Metrics Are Zodiac Signs for Digital Marketers
DA, DR, and trust scores function as astrology—providing the illusion of measurement without correlation to actual business outcomes. "Our domain authority dropped three points!" has the same energy as "Mercury is in retrograde, that's why our conversions are down!" Revenue remains the only metric that matters.

The Honda Civic Story: Link Sellers in 2025

If you've got a bad ads guy, guaranteed there's a link team lurking. Remember that guy from high school?

Recently divorced. Drove a busted Honda Civic. Wore drooping cross earrings. Was the "DJ" at the local skate rink. And he's thirty-fucking-two. Called his side hustles "business ventures." Sold the worst weed—nothing but seeds and stems.

That's your agency link seller in 2025. Same energy, same results, same product he had in '96, same bullshit pitch. And just like back then, you're about to get played because you're too desperate to see the red flags.

The SEO Truth vs. The Ads Lie

SEO PPC
You own it. (Build once, runs forever) You rent it. (Stop paying → traffic vanishes)
Gets smarter over time. (Rankings compound) Resets every month. (Bid flip → start over)
Organic traffic is free traffic $50/lead, $200/sale and rising
Google's SGE is breaking your dishwasher while selling you dish insurance. The PPC guys are still charging $10,000/month to hand-wash dishes while the kitchen burns.

The Solution Stack: Three Pillars of Algorithmic Resistance

Architecture As Strategy
Structure equals strategy. Your website structure should resemble a well-designed city, not a random shantytown of content erected wherever you found space. SGE rewards entity-based clustering and logical information hierarchy. Most sites are the digital equivalent of Boston's street layout—historically explicable but practically insane.

Internal Linking As Power Distribution
This is website socialism in its purest form—redistributing authority from your strongest pages to your conversion assets. Backlinks capture headlines while internal links quietly transfer authority to pages that actually generate revenue. Your homepage is basically your site's trust fund baby—born rich, never worked a day in its life. Force it to share its inheritance.

Context Beats Copying Every Fucking Time
Your site. Your market. Your rules. AI-scraped content dies while unique insights survive. The algorithm increasingly rewards difference, not sameness. Generic AI content creates a perfect storm of mediocrity. Meanwhile, elite players leverage AI to scale proprietary insights rather than regurgitate what already exists.

The 2025 Warning Shot: Digital Darwinism

Google's SGE Is the Soviet Union of Information
They've effectively nationalized informational content. With 40% of queries now answered inline, Google has transformed from search engine to information redistribution engine. That "how to tie a tie" query you ranked for? Congratulations, it's been collectivized. Your organic farm now belongs to the algorithm.

AI Content = Oxygen (If You're Elite)
Google rewards brands + proprietary data while burying generic content. The divide isn't between AI and human content—it's between commodity information and unreproducible perspectives. It's not about who wrote it; it's about who could have written it.

Platform Leverage Is the New Backlink
YouTube, LinkedIn, and podcasts outrank traditional SEO signals. Build authority outside Google to win inside Google. The algorithm tracks how users interact with your brand across platforms, using engagement metrics as quality signals.

Three Ways to Not Die in 2025

Redirect 20% of ad spend into SEO
Turn top-performing ad copy into 10X landing pages that convert
Own the demand before Google
Build an email list, Discord, or app—where you control the relationship
Make ads work for YOU
Use PPC to test messaging, then scale what works organically
We'll still obsess over rankings. Still chase backlinks. Still run audits nobody reads.

But the brutal truth remains: Most sites just need better content, smarter structure, and relentless execution.

Everything else? Theater.

And theater, as always, sells better than truth. The beautiful contradiction of our entire industry.

Hi, I'm Simon Dodson and I'm the author of AI Marketing Innovation: The Beautiful.

The Multi-Dimensional Persona Architecture (MDPA) 2.0

SIMON DODSON — Sat, 10 May 2025 21:58:56 +0000

The MDPA 2.0 Framework: Engineering Content That Commands Attention

*A mechanical neural trigger framework that increases reader engagement by 35% compared to traditional content approaches.

Introduction

The Dodson MDPA 2.0 Framework represents a sophisticated evolution in strategic content creation. At its core, MDPA 2.0 orchestrates three distinct narrative personas to create content that doesn't just communicate—it captivates, challenges, and converts.

Born from two decades of observing what makes content truly resonate, this framework transforms standard messaging into multi-layered communication designed to cut through digital noise. Where traditional content relies on singular voice and tone, MDPA 2.0 deploys a calculated interplay of perspectives that mirror how audiences actually think, question, and decide.

The Operating Philosophy

MDPA 2.0 functions as a psychological positioning system, carefully calibrating between authority, insight, and disruption. The framework recognizes that modern audiences operate on multiple cognitive levels simultaneously—they seek credibility while craving originality, demand evidence while yearning for meaning.

The system employs three core personas:

The Architect: Data-driven authority figure
The Bard: Pattern-seeking meaning maker
The Saboteur: Status quo challenger

These voices don't operate independently but weave together in strategic sequences, creating content that feels both authoritative and surprising, grounded yet transformative.

Strategic Implementation

The framework operates through carefully constructed psychological triggers and positioning. Rather than following rigid formulas, MDPA 2.0 adapts to context, audience state, and desired outcomes. Content flows through deliberate phases—disruption to attention, evidence to trust, synthesis to action—each calibrated to the audience's psychological readiness.

What makes MDPA 2.0 particularly effective is its understanding of cognitive tension. By introducing controlled dissonance through the Saboteur voice, then resolving it through the Architect's evidence and the Bard's synthesis, the framework creates memorable, impactful content that drives engagement and action.

Dynamic Adaptation

The true power of MDPA 2.0 lies in its flexibility. Persona weights shift based on audience psychology, market conditions, and strategic objectives. A conservative B2B audience might receive Architect-heavy content with subtle Saboteur undertones, while a progressive consumer audience might experience Bard-led narratives punctuated by bold Saboteur challenges.

This adaptive approach ensures content remains fresh and relevant while maintaining strategic coherence. The framework provides structure without rigidity, guidance without prescription.

The Transformation Effect

MDPA 2.0 doesn't just deliver information—it creates experiences. By cycling through different cognitive states and psychological positions, content built on this framework achieves what single-voice approaches cannot: it simultaneously establishes authority while maintaining intrigue, provides certainty while embracing complexity.

The result is content that audiences remember, share, and act upon. In an attention economy where most messages disappear into the void, MDPA 2.0 creates communication that resonates, persists, and ultimately, performs.

View the detailed mechanics paper →

The Recursive Design: The Framework That Demonstrates Itself

The key insight of MDPA 2.0 is its self-referential structure—it uses the exact techniques it's explaining, in real-time, while explaining them. This creates a demonstration-within-description that operates on multiple levels simultaneously.

How It Works

When MDPA content discusses psychological triggers, it's actively triggering them. As it explains the Saboteur's disruption tactics, it disrupts. While outlining how the Architect builds credibility, it builds credibility through that outline.

This creates several concurrent operations:

Teaching persuasion while persuading
Revealing manipulation while manipulating
Exposing techniques while employing them

The Loop Structure

The framework generates more cognitive loops than readers can consciously track:

Transparency Loop: Discussing manipulation openly while actively manipulating
Authority Loop: Explaining credibility-building while building credibility
Pattern Loop: Describing pattern recognition while creating recognizable patterns
Meta Loop: Acknowledging these loops while creating new ones

Why Awareness Doesn't Break It

Knowing you're being influenced doesn't stop the influence. Readers recognize the techniques being used on them, but the techniques continue working. This creates voluntary participation—audiences become conscious collaborators in their own persuasion.

The Practical Result

MDPA 2.0 exploits how human cognition actually works: we can't simultaneously analyze every level of communication. While readers focus on understanding one layer, other layers operate unexamined. The framework's complexity ensures some persuasive elements always function below conscious awareness.

Real-World Application

Read "The Silent Killer: One Man's Unintentional Surgical Dismantling of Marketing's Bloated Corpse" for a live demonstration of MDPA 2.0 in action.

This multi-level operation is what makes MDPA 2.0 particularly effective—it educates about influence while influencing, creating content that demonstrates its own principles through its very existence.

Case Study

The Silent Killer: One Man's Unintentional Surgical Dismantling of Marketing's Bloated Corpse

Learn More:

Powerful Simple Query

SIMON DODSON — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 03:00:17 +0000

You would be surprised just how powerful Google is with the correct input, my favorite all-time query is If you run this search query into google and replace the desired input, its a very simple and fruitful query for discovering pages you may have forgot to delete or for discovering intel you did not want public or tried to block, or forgot to delete, or has unintentionally left content others may find extremely interesting, obviously it works in reverse. wink

site:google.com -inurl:https & site:google.com -inurl:http

This is a very simple query, that is very powerful.

qldseo.com.au

when predatory journalism was 'clever'

SIMON DODSON — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 01:09:14 +0000

“90% percent of stories either shouldn’t have been written or should have been 10% the length. Most people do not want to spend five minutes on 1500 words of mediocrity on something that has one interesting fact, figure or quote." - salon founder Rosenberg.

back when predatory journalism was a display of smarts.... #ick! #gawker

https://lnkd.in/fD4ZNXs
qldseo.com.au

idoamake

SIMON DODSON — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 01:03:15 +0000

https://incode-abcb5.netlify.com

Structural Engineers jamstack

Google is a ad company, make no bones about it.

SIMON DODSON — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 03:22:46 +0000

SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT

google blurs the line between paid and organic serps in new search listing results design,

oh boomers gonna love this….

you’re welcome.

On January 13, Google rolled out a new design for search results on the desktop. Of course, this design isn’t exactly new, it has been around on mobile since last year.

One of the most significant changes to come from the desktop redesign is the new favicons that appear next to URLs.

This was in an effort to help (#dontbeevil) sites with branding and made it possible to see if the results are coming from one of your favorite or most trusted sites with a quick look instead of having to read the URL.

However, this redesign also blurred the lines between organic search results and ads by placing an “Ad” icon next to advertisements in the results. While the ads are still clearly labeled, the streamlined design now makes it easier for some users to mistake ads for actual search results.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxZh3XMna20

Make no bones about it, google is a ad company.

SERGIO
enjoy….

site comparison site

SIMON DODSON — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 15:44:15 +0000

looking at doing a site comparison site in the health niche and was wondering if anyone has seen anything interesting and progressive in the comparison site space?

Small Business Websites Receive Less Than 500 Visits Per Month

SIMON DODSON — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 21:38:59 +0000

‘A study of Google Analytics for local businesses finds that their websites attract an average of 414 monthly users, with 50% of traffic coming from organic search a month.’

Analytics company BrightLocal analyzed Google Analytics data from over 11,000 websites to determine benchmarks for local business websites across different industries.

Rewind: On July 1993 rapper Ice Cube released his 3rd solo album since leaving groundbreaking group NWA , with Track 3 heavily utilizing radio fans favorite beat by Grandmaster Flash LP named “The Message”, titled “Check Yo Self (The Message Remix)” with Cube extending the Grandmasters hit to:

→
: Check Yo Self, Before You Wreck Ya Self…
Essentially Cube's intention here with “check yourself, don’t wreck yourself” is take a step back and reconsider your actions before you get yourself in trouble.
→

Moreover, if you don't know the measurement, let alone the benchmark, I'm intentionally going to break school and use bold, pull-quote, italics underlined typeset to emphasise here with ‘you really don't know anything’ and if your marketer isn't telling you this, reconsider.

The numbers:
‘ On the lower end of the spectrum — 13% of local businesses receive fewer than 100 visitors to their sites each month, while 55% receive fewer than 500.
On the higher end, 20% of businesses receive more than 1500 monthly visitors to their site, and 15% receive over 2500 visitors.’
“Websites for businesses focusing on cleaning, marketing, and alternative therapies receive the lowest number of visitors each month. This could be attributed to a lower volume of need (more people will be looking for a bar than a cleaner on a regular basis!), with many businesses receiving low volumes of users, and the most successful bringing up the average from the other end.”

Continuing;

“At the other end of the scale, marketing businesses receive just 29% of traffic from organic sources. While this may seem shocking at first glance, it’s likely to be because marketers are more familiar with the other channels, and have higher usage of these — thus pushing down the proportion allocated to organic.”
Other interesting insights:

The average local business’s website receives 2.17 pages per session.
Mobile-only visitors visit an average of just 1.88 pages per session.
54% of websites don’t have goals set up in Google Analytics.
Local businesses receive an average of 1,099 page views per month. — No One’s home
The average session on a local business’s website is 96 seconds.
The average bounce rate for local businesses is 60.23%.

Websites in the marketing industry have the highest bounce rate.

Most SMBS I work with are well above these avgs, however, some aren't, but I also see smaller sites convert more than 1 million page views a month does, so it's perspective and relationship that matters most and the understanding and measurement of this.

I think this study is by and large a relieving sign to business owners that the hard work they do is on par or better than these numbers, for the others its quite alarming how far you are away, from a good day.….

Sources
https://www.brightlocal.com/research/google-analytics-for-local-businesses-study/
https://perthsnews.com.au/over-50-of-local-business-websites-receive-less-than-500-visits-per-month/

Ex-Googler lifts the lid on search myths

SIMON DODSON — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:43:28 +0000

x-Googler lifts the lid on search myths, key takeaways.

SEO is renowned for misinformation, misunderstandings, and misconceptions. This is in no small part due to Google being somewhat of a black box in order to try and limit gaming of SERPs.

However, in recent times, Google has taken noticeable steps to become more transparent through increased activity in the SEO community.

SEO is not a one-time thing it’s ongoing.

prop.tech seo myths for realty websites

It is true new domains do infact experience a honeymoon period.
The basics, speed, links, neighborhood really really matter.
The idea Google has a personal vendetta solely against your site is always proven wrong with a quick audit.
Freshness matters.
Paid spend does not influence organic signals.
All sites are repairable if you work with them.

hashtag#sites hashtag#seonews Very interesting read. #proptech