SEO And Independent Websites

March 23, 2026

Note: This post ended up being a lot more of a speculative exploration of ideas, rather than being a concrete declaration of opinions, so do keep that in mind while reading.

I spend a lot of my time on the more independent sides of the internet, away from all the Big Tech of Google, Facebook, and that type of thing. Out here on fringe, there's a lot of tendencies of the mainstream web that are (rightfully) frowned upon. Tracking and ads, for instance, are basically a no-go in these spaces. If you run an independent website for your blog and you're serving ads, people don't like that. Those ads are being used to track you as you browse the web, mapping out every single site you visit, basically feeding a profile of your likes and dislikes straight into Google's gaping eye of surveillance.

So we don't like that. We talk bad on it. For good reason.

Another one we don't like is known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. If you've ever read a blog that was 50% just repeating the title to you every single paragraph, that's SEO-slop. Content which is trying to communicate as effectively as possible to the search engine you're using, while fully missing the part where it needs to actually be readable by you once you click the link. With the advent of LLMs, SEO-slop has gotten a lot more pervasive, and as a result, search has gotten worse.

Even if you're using a less shitty search engine like DuckDuckGo or Kagi or what have you, the results are still likely being polluted with SEO-slop that is utterly terrible to read and extract meaning from. Take a look at this little blurb from 404Media, the independent news site that publishes stories mostly about the role of tech in politics and our lives:

"404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists. Our intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm."

https://www.404media.co/about/

This is the general attitude of people who veer away from the centralized hubs of online Big Tech. No matter where you go, you'll see the same general essence: We are not the machine, and we don't create content to be consumed by the machine. We're humans, making human content, so that other humans will see it. We don't pervert our content for a machine so that it will distribute it to more humans. The machine is a tool that takes human expression and sends it out as is. We will not let it putrefy our art.

I agree with this, by the way. If you're destroying the product of your art in order for it to be seen by more people, then you're literally defeating the purpose. Also, if you're a company who is doing SEO so that you'll get me to buy something, I literally despise that. Putting out fake review articles that are actually just ads is deceitful and awful.

On the other hand, if you create a piece of art on the web that you really feel proud of, like an article or blog post, I wouldn't blame you for trying to communicate a few basic facts about the post to search engines so it will show it to people who want to see it.

What does that mean? It could mean a few things. Picking a good title, one that people might end up actually searching for (especially if you're making tutorials, since that's the main tool you'll use when looking for tutorials). Throw some of the main keywords somewhere in the top, if you want people to be able to find it based on that.

Obviously don't slopify it by spending 5 paragraphs getting to the point. Keep it human, but do some things so the search engines promote it, and people see your high-quality page, instead of having to gruel through the AI-generated article that was optimized to the point of unreadability.[1]

Search engines do a number of things to figure out who to put on the top of a particular search. The obvious thing they do is read the page, which we've already talked about. Another is that they'll look at how many other pages have linked to your page or site. (They also look at how many times your own site links to a given page, but they don't take it into much consideration compared to other pages).

While I'm not recommending link spam, I think it would be worth making more of an effort to link to sites and pages that we like more often. Webrings have somewhat of this effect, but obviously those little widgets aren't exactly encoding the links of everybody on the page. They're quite useful for humans already on the site, but if you want search engines to be able to find your friends[2], you should include links directly into your site somewhere.

I try to make a point about linking to as much stuff as possible on my blog. If you've read even just one of my posts, you'll probably be able to guess how much I like to link to Cory Doctorow's blog over at Pluralistic. Something I really like about his blog is just how much he links to other pages. To the extent that reading a blog post of his slowly turns into a journey across the whole web.

https://pluralistic.net/

A lot of the blogs I interact with by less IndieWeb folks tend to be pretty bad about this. There's lots of good blogs on sites like Substack, but they're usually not very good about including abundant links in their posts, despite the high quality otherwise.

I wish the blogging world had a better tendency to link around. In fact, I'm currently considering different creative options for displaying links to all the new posts by blogs I appreciate. I'm probably going to program a little Eleventy function that updates the list with new posts every time I rebuild my site.

On the other hand, maybe I'll just stick to a hand-curated collection by shouting them out at the end of my blog, or else mentioning them within the blog.

The web only works as well as it does because of how many pages make extensive use of links, allowing us to easily navigate from one page to another, without needing every hop to involve a search engine and a question. Sometimes (often) people want to find things that they never knew to ask for. The less that websites include links to other pages, the less spontaneous and creative the web becomes[3]. I guess that's getting a little off track of the topic of linking to good pages so search engines will show them to more people, though.

It bears asking

All this discussion of search and the degradation of it leaves me wondering if perhaps the way we're discovering new content on the web isn't a little fragile? As broken as Google is right now, it still works. To this day, if you search "vimwiki" on its own in any search engine, my post[4] shows up just after all the official resources, and underneath the much more relevant tutorial by Veronica Explains and a few others. So they still do show tiny little blogs if you search the right (niche) terms.

https://vkc.sh/vimwiki-101/

But the fact that things still kind of work now is a very fragile assurance that they won't get worse tomorrow. Earlier this year there was an incident where all of neocities (including both the site itself, and all subdomains hosted on it) got blocked from Bing search results, which had the effect of also removing them from other engines such as DuckDuckGo. The problem has since been resolved, but it goes to show the fragility of the system we're dealing with. What if this happened to somebody smaller who didn't have as large of a community to pull from?

https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2026/01/27/bing-block

I don't have the solution. A diversity of search engines is a step in the right direction, but creating your own web index is so costly that basically only the major tech companies are able to run them, and all the other engines just proxy through them. Perhaps a tool like Marginalia Search could become useful:

https://marginalia-search.com/

I also wonder if human curation by the community might somehow be able to improve things. After all, I don't think we're living in an ecosystem where tech companies are bending over backwards to make interesting or better things for us to use. If we want the web to work, we're going to have to work on this ourselves.

I saw this thread on Mastodon about good wikis and information preservation in the context of technical communities, and it made me wonder if the same concept (which has been tried and tested to some extent) could maybe be expanded to a wider category of general web exploration? Maybe that's too ambitious and too prone to bad actors ruining everyone's fun, I'm not really sure, but it was an interesting idea nonetheless.

https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/116132773124280983

Veronica Explains also made a very interesting post about quitting search for 3 months a while back, which I found to be insightful, as well as the link to the Wikipedia page for the Google effect that she included.

https://vkc.sh/quit-search/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_effect

I don't really know where we should be going, in terms of what future tech we should use to traverse the web, but as things remain currently, we really need to build a stronger community. More connection between independent sites. I won't tell you whether you should or shouldn't be trying to search-optimize your site, but if you want to do it, I don't think you should feel bad about it.

  1. Most people would probably argue that this level of tweaking isn't even SEO. It's just good design. Using metadata and titles and including some basic keywords at the top of an article in order to communicate to the search engines without degrading the experience for the user is hardly the same thing that the actual SEO folks are doing. Just something to keep in mind. Most people are not talking about this kind of simple thing when they talk about SEO. They're talking about wholesale sloppification of their content in order to sell it to the search engine, rather than trying to sell it to the reader. ↩︎

  2. Not something everybody on the IndieWeb is necessarily aiming for, but plenty are! It just depends what the user's goals are with their website. I do wanna get discovered on search engines, so I do things here and there to make sure my page shows up on relevant searches for my name. To each their own. ↩︎

  3. I will say that one thing I particularly like about (some) social media platforms is how good they are at pushing links around. Back when I was on Reddit, they were pretty good about this (despite some other flaws), and now that I'm on Mastodon, they're even better about this. Part of my experience is related to the fact that I just follow a lot of bloggers, but hey, so what? The point is that it's a pretty effective tool for pushing around interesting links. Also, Hacker News tends to be pretty good as well (just try not to spend too much time in the comment section). ↩︎

  4. Sidenote, I really ought to make a follow-up to that post. I wasn't really sure what I wanted my blog to be yet at that point (and I still don't, not fully!), and so it didn't really seem to be driving towards any specific purpose. Maybe I might enjoy writing some really solid tutorial posts? ↩︎

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