I was at a meetup last year and mentioned i was working on an SEO tool. The developer next to me literally said "Oh, so you're in the snake oil business?"
And honestly? I get it.
The SEO industry has done this to itself. Between the keyword stuffing era, the link farm era, the "write 10,000 words of fluff to rank" era, and now the "AI-generated content at scale" era, developers have every reason to be skeptical.
But the pendulum has swung too far. A lot of developers now dismiss ALL of SEO as nonsense, including the parts that are genuinely important engineering concerns. And that costs them traffic, users, and money.
So lets talk about what's actually scammy and whats actually worth your time.
The Scammy Parts (They're Half Right)
Keyword density targets
Anyone telling you to use your keyword exactly 3.7% of the time is making that number up. Google has used semantic understanding for years. Write naturally. If you know what your page is about, the keywords will be there. This has been confirmed repeatedly by Google's own documentation.
"Build 100 backlinks per month"
Most link building services sell garbage links from spam sites. Google's spam detection is good enough that these links either do nothing or actively hurt you. The "backlinks are the #1 ranking factor" crowd is still stuck in 2015.
Page authority scores
Moz DA, Ahrefs DR, Semrush Authority Score. These are all made-up metrics by the tool companies. Google does not use them. They can be useful as rough comparisons, but people treat them like credit scores and thats wrong.
Content length requirements
"Your blog post needs to be at least 2,000 words to rank." No it doesnt. Google has explicitly said content length is not a ranking factor. A 500 word page that directly answers a question will outrank a 3,000 word page of fluff. I've seen it happen dozens of times.
SEO agencies that guarantee rankings
Run away. No one can guarantee rankings because no one controls Google's algorithm. Anyone who promises "page 1 in 30 days" is either lying or using tactics that will get you penalized eventually.
The Non-Scammy Parts (They're Half Wrong)
Here's where developers hurt themselves by dismissing everything.
Technical SEO is real engineering
Crawlability, indexability, site speed, mobile usability, structured data. These are engineering problems with engineering solutions. If Googlebot cant crawl your JavaScript-rendered pages, your content doesnt exist in Google's index. Thats not snake oil, thats how web crawlers work.
// This is a real problem that affects real sites
// Server-side rendering matters for SEO
// Bad: Client-side only rendering
// Google WILL render JavaScript, but it queues it
// and rendering can be delayed by hours or days
function ProductPage() {
const [product, setProduct] = useState(null);
useEffect(() => {
fetch('/api/product/123').then(r => r.json()).then(setProduct);
}, []);
if (!product) return <div>Loading...</div>;
return <div>{product.title}</div>;
}
// Better: Server-side render the important content
// Next.js, Remix, Astro all handle this well
export async function getServerSideProps() {
const product = await fetchProduct(123);
return { props: { product } };
}
According to web.dev's rendering guide, Google's rendering queue can delay indexing of client-side-only content by days or weeks. This is an engineering fact, not an SEO opinion.
Core Web Vitals affect rankings
Google confirmed CWV is a ranking signal. Not a huge one, but a real one. And more importantly, CWV metrics directly correlate with user experience and conversion rates. A page that takes 5 seconds to load loses visitors regardless of what Google thinks.
Meta tags matter (the right ones)
Title tags and meta descriptions dont directly affect rankings much, but they determine what people see in search results. A good title tag can double your click-through rate. Thats not scammy, thats copywriting for search results.
Broken links and redirects matter
If you have internal links pointing to 404 pages, thats bad for users AND search engines. If you change URLs without redirects, you lose whatever ranking equity that page had. These are basic web engineering concerns.
Duplicate content wastes crawl budget
If Google finds 50 versions of the same page (with different query parameters, pagination, etc.) it has to figure out which one to index. Canonical tags solve this. This is a real technical problem.
What Developers Should Actually Care About
If your a developer who thinks SEO is beneath you, fine. But at least do these things:
Server-side render your important pages. Or use static site generation. Client-side rendering is fine for app dashboards, not for content that needs to be indexed.
Have unique title tags and meta descriptions on every page. Takes 5 minutes per page and directly affects CTR.
Implement canonical tags. Especially if your URL structure generates duplicate paths.
Make sure your site is fast on mobile. Use Lighthouse, check CWV, optimize images. This is just good engineering.
Don't break URLs without redirects. Set up redirect rules for any URL changes.
Use structured data. JSON-LD is just metadata. Its not magic, its giving search engines explicit information about your content.
Submit a sitemap. Its an XML file that lists your pages. Takes 10 minutes to set up with most frameworks.
Thats it. Thats the non-scammy SEO checklist for developers. Everything else is optimization on top of these basics.
The Real Problem
The reason developers think SEO is scammy is because the SEO industry is dominated by marketers who dont understand technology, selling services to business owners who dont understand marketing. The result is a lot of smoke and mirrors.
But underneath all that smoke, there's a legitimate engineering discipline. Search engines are software. They have documented behaviors. Optimizing for them is no different than optimizing for any other system you interact with.
You dont have to become an "SEO expert." But dismissing the entire field means your leaving traffic on the table. And for indie developers and small teams, organic search traffic is often the cheapest, most sustainable growth channel you have.
So yeah, the developer at the meetup was half right. A lot of SEO is snake oil. But the other half is just web engineering with a marketing name. And that half is worth caring about.
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