Jono Alderson @ MozCon 2018
In this MozCon keynote, Jono Alderson reflects on his long career across agencies, consultancies, and tool vendors, concluding that he now "hates technical SEO" because the work has become a repetitive treadmill of fixing 404s, redirects, canonicals, and other well‑documented issues. He shares survey data showing that thousands of technical SEOs collectively waste millions of hours and tens of millions of dollars each month on these low‑value tasks, framing it as a systemic inefficiency. Alderson argues that the SEO industry is immature, overly dependent on a few "rock‑star" unicorns, and suffers from fragmented ownership and a lack of mature processes. He critiques the traditional T‑shaped marketer model, noting that the expanding web ecosystem now demands breadth beyond any individual’s capacity. To break the cycle, he proposes a shift from fixing symptoms to building systemic, open‑source solutions. He highlights Google’s push for block‑level schema and the Gutenberg editor in WordPress as a pathway to more structured, machine‑readable content, explaining how this could reduce the need for manual technical fixes. Alderson calls on SEOs to contribute to open‑source platforms like WordPress, to influence schema implementation, and to collaborate rather than compete, thereby democratizing knowledge and preventing the industry from being sidelined by platform developers. The talk ends with a concrete invitation to get involved in WordPress core, emphasizing that even non‑developers can make impactful contributions.
Chapters
This is awesome. Look at all of you. Okay, where do we start? I've done a whole bunch of different things. I've worked in agencies, done consultancy for all sorts of different clients. I've worked at tool vendors, and I've seen a lot of the web. Why is this important? Because I think I've seen and touched on SEO from a lot of different angles, from a lot of different directions. And as a result of that, I understand the mechanics, I understand the opportunities, and I see the same dysfunction in lots of different places, which is why I've got something I want to get off my chest. I have a confession. I've recently come to a realization that I hate technical SEO. I'm worried that huge amounts of the time that I've spent fixing 404s and telling businesses how canonical URLs work and scoping technical requirements, et cetera, is time poorly spent. More broadly, I'm not sure what SEO or technical SEO is anymore or what it's going to become. And all of this keeps me awake at night. It's deeply frustrating and confusing. So I'd like to tell you a little about me and explain how and why I've come to this realization and maybe some thoughts about what I think we need to do about it. I'm obsessed with learning new stuff, new skills, new ideas, new techniques, new technologies. That's why I'm in SEO. New shiny things abound. It's always exciting. I spend a lot of time thinking about what motivates me as a person and what I want to do and what I want to learn next and what I want to build. Lots of introspection. One of the things which is important to me is making a materially positive impact on the world. Now, that's a big brief, but I want to use what I know and what I can do to make the world better in some small, tangible, meaningful way. And for a long time, that's been through my work. I've done super smart technical SEO and identified the problem and fixed the bug and improved the websites. And I've had the opportunity along the way to do some really seriously impactful things. I've done SEO for public sector businesses, public sector organizations, and done things like increased blood donations and organ transplants, which is really cool and really impactful, so I can sit back pat myself on the back, and tell myself I'm making a difference. Except more recently, as I've got older and maybe a bit wiser, that started to feel self-indulgent. It started to feel arrogant, unhealthy even. The more I looked at what I was doing, the less I liked it, and the less impact I saw on the real world, particularly because I wasn't making a difference. In fact, when I come to think about it, I've been fixing 404s and removing disallow rules and explaining how meta tags work for well over a decade now. I've diagnosed and fixed the same issues, every version of every technical problem that every website has ever had, 100 times. And sure, a few businesses added some zeros to their bottom lines, but I'm still fixing the same things over and over again. Nothing's changing. Nothing's improving. It's the same problems. It's the same conversations, the same failings, the same broken websites, and the same broken businesses. 3. Yeah. Preach. And I wanted to know if this was just me, and clearly it's not. Thank you, Mike. So I want to know if we all feel like this, if we're all spending loads of time just reinventing the wheel. So I threw a quick survey onto Twitter. Thank you for everybody who responded. It looks like this. I asked, how much time do you spend fixing basic stuff, things like redirects, canonicals, things which are codified, binary, right or wrong, well documented? And it turns out all of you are spending loads of time doing this stuff. In fact, a huge number of people responded and said my scale of the possible options was far too limited, that people are spending hundreds and hundreds of hours per month doing this sort of thing. I got some really good anecdotal feedback from reputable people like Richard Baxter as well, saying that he spends half of his time fixing things like 500 range errors and 404s and just things— botched sitemaps, single-page apps, call traps in category filters, the same kinds of things over and over again. I find this deeply uncomfortable. How can we claim to be optimizers when we generate so much waste? Now, there are lots of industries where the work is essentially just a treadmill, and in many cases that's fine, but we're incredibly lucky, as Sarah pointed out, to be in an industry which changes, which evolves, which moves forward. We have velocity. And at the end of the day, maybe it's fine that we just all make part of our living from fixing these kinds of things over and over again. A lot of people said, yeah, I spend tons of time fixing 404s, but you know what, that's how I pay my mortgage, so how I feed my children, maybe that's fine. But I think even if you're OK with that, it doesn't resonate well. I think it's not optimal. The thing that we do, the thing that we are, the thing that we sell is fine-tuning the machine. It's refinement. It's optimization. So what if we could spend those wasted hours moving forwards rather than struggling not to run backwards? Which got me wondering, how much wasted resource are we talking about? If everybody is spending half of their time fixing tedious stuff over and over again, What's the cost of that? So I went back to my survey data, and assuming that it's generally applicable and reasonably in the right direction, how much time and money is that? So if you go on LinkedIn and search for technical SEO, there's somewhere between 40,000 and 400,000 technical SEOs, depending on how you filter it and categorize it. That's my first and second degree and third degree connections. Hopefully that's many of you. That's 1 to 9 million working hours per month spent on fixing the same kinds of 404s and 301s over and over again. Now, PayScale— I don't know how accurate this is, but PayScale says the average US SEO salary is $46,000-ish, which means that we are wasting somewhere between $20 and $200 million every month in fixing the same well-defined, code-defined things over and over again. As an industry made of people who optimize things, this feels criminal. It's embarrassing. These are basic failures. For defined things, robots.txt botches, missing canonicals, slow pages, broken XML feeds. Google's documentation on this sort of stuff is really good, as are others. Surprisingly, it's really robust. It's really in-depth. Getting it right only requires that you read the documentation, you copy and paste the example, or you adapt it to your own needs, and you put it in place. This is the kind of thing that developers generally get right in other areas. It's only in SEO that it keeps going wrong. And I wanted to understand why and how that happens and why it's so prolific and why people don't learn and improve and stop it from happening next time. I'm going to speed up because I've got lots to get through. Think about doctors, doctors and surgeons. We are not unlike doctors and surgeons. They assess, diagnose, make recommendations, suggest courses of treatments. They collaborate between each other. They codify their learnings as they discover new ways of thinking. They require a great deal of peripheral knowledge into related sectors and areas. Between them, they move forward and medicine as a whole improves. Now imagine if doctors and surgeons treated every patient in isolation, if they reinvented the wheel every time, every broken bone, every injury, every disease. If you just went to the doctor every month with a broken limb or anemia or gout and they just fixed it and sent you on their way, that would be insane. Of course, they don't do that. They try and fix the root cause. They assess your general health. They ask about smoking and drinking. They try and fix the thing which caused. the issue. And I think as a discipline, we have been so busy focusing on understanding and codifying how Google works that we have forgotten to understand and codify how SEO works. We are so busy doing the tactical bits that we haven't diagnosed us and how we work and decided what it is. I think we've underinvested in areas like business structures and psychology and analysis and resource and ownership and processes and frameworks. And as a result, as an industry, we're not very mature. So there's all this dysfunction and all this waste. And I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that we haven't stood back and worked out how it is that we need to work. And it's not just in technical SEO. We see the same kinds of issues in content marketing, in link building, in reporting, in data, in agency partnerships. We're going round and round in circles. We're still educating clients on the importance of UX. We're still fighting for a decent mobile site. We're still trying to get people to stop just building or buying links, to sort out their analytics to improve the quality of their messaging. We're doing the same stuff over and over again. We are not moving forwards. So as a result, SEO has in many places just evolved into a campaign-centric discipline. We build content microsites, we try and get links to the parallax infographic thing we built, because that's easier than trying to tackle the terrifying reality that is that most websites and businesses are on fire, and all we can do is juggle and try and stop them falling apart. I think we can fix this. I think if you truly want to optimize, not only do you need to be a master of everything that's SEO, but also of corporate psychology, of product management, of project management, of regression testing, of DevOps, and more. You need to consider how SEO fits in with related disciplines, business functions, skills, and people. You need to master all of those moving parts. But we can do that. We are an industry of self-made rock stars. We excel at picking up new skills and fitting them in and moving quickly and adapting. That's why we're here. That's our thing. Our superpower is that flexibility. That's why we're here today. But I think that the way that we think about SEO isn't mature enough to adapt to a changing world and changing needs, which is why things are broken and why we're still reinventing the wheel. Is everyone familiar with a T-shaped marketing model? Generally? Anyone? Somebody? No? Okay. So the basic principle is that if you want to excel, you need to be really good at one thing and generally okay at pretty much everything else. And this is the de facto model for how to become a better marketer or a better SEO. Lots of the speakers here have talked about it, referenced it, written books about it, etc. I think the reality is actually usually a bit more like this. You have a core strength and then some extra bits that connect to it or might be unrelated. The thing is, as our industry matures and gets more complex and gets more bits, that breadth needs to increase. You need to know a little bit about many, many more things. And actually, if we're saying that part of our challenge is that we're not very good at the organizational stuff and working out how SEO fits, you need to also be good at training and psychology and project management and develop all of these skills. And as the web undergoes a continual technical renaissance, we also need to master those skills. Things like JavaScript, PWAs, speed— things we'll hear a lot about over the next few days— these become imperatives too. And of course, you need to understand how they all fit together. And if we're saying that it's getting harder and harder to generate coverage and to get links and attention without having a brand or a product that's meaningful and valuable, you also need to get good at product building and brand building and PR and journalism and creative. And of course, The whole web is becoming more complex. Your baseline understanding of the whole marketing ecosystem needs to get deeper. The good news is we've coped with this so far. We've become T-shaped strategic, tactical, technical marketing rock stars. Good work. But I think we'll struggle to get much further. I think this doesn't scale as we introduce more and more technologies and more and more requirements to make SEO work. This doesn't scale. It's unrealistic. People have finite time, finite priorities, finite headspace. Hands up, anyone in this room who is an expert in all of those disciplines, enough that you know that your business will never make a mistake if you take your eye off the ball. So we are already out of our depth. Nobody here is an SEO because they don't do all of this. That's terrifying. It's already gone beyond our capabilities to manage and juggle this in a way that means that people don't drop balls and break things. If we want to fix the underlying root causes that mean that we go round and round and over and over again fixing the same things, We can't rely on people just mastering all of the skills. So I think we need a new model. I think we're so busy optimizing for the component parts and the pieces that we need to take a step back and look at how we learn, how we improve, and how we codify our things. Let me show you another way of looking at this. I want to take you back in time to when SEO was a younger, simpler discipline, when it was a commodified thing you could just do. I think the model looked something like this. You needed to juggle Content, tech, and authority, which was slang for links. If you were forward-thinking, you might also look at areas like reputation and brand. You needed enough knowledge in each of these areas to be able to understand how they connected and to manage those moving parts. Obviously, this is an oversimplification. I think the reality maybe looked a bit more like this. There's lots of overlapping, interrelated bits, and in the middle sits this discipline that is SEO. And your job is to understand enough about those areas and where they overlap with SEO to catch them and optimize them and improve them. This carpet is already winding up, that's gonna be fun. Let me show you what I think that model looks like today. The ecosystem is much more complex. Things like UX and speed, etc., aren't part of SEO. They're mature disciplines in their own right that SEO is influenced by but doesn't own. I think it looks like this. SEO is just something that these disciplines have in common. Now we're flitting around the edges trying to tackle and optimize the outside bits because they're easy to influence, but the dense middle bits is where you make different— where you make a difference, where things break, where the opportunity is to win. That's hard to influence. And even if you can learn and be good at all of these things and get inside these areas, the world gets more complex tomorrow. It looks more like this. There are more pieces. They extend outside of our field of view and remits. These disciplines mature in their own rights. So we come to realize that the only way to do SEO in an organization or as an agency is to recruit more rock stars who can stitch these areas together. We train more SEO unicorns and rock stars. We go to more conferences. We learn more things. We throw more super smart people at it and hope that they become even smarter. As a discipline, we are relying on rock stars. But that can't be the solution, Lisa. It doesn't scale. It's not realistic. You've got to learn all of the things. So unless you're lucky enough to be working in an organization which is incredibly well-resourced and forward-thinking, Your ability to do SEO is capped by how many unicorns you can hire. The thing is, rock stars don't scale. You can't just keep hiring or growing them or recruiting them because there are only a finite number of people with a finite number of hours. And as businesses get more complex and SEO gets more complex, these people get busier and stretched thinner as they pick up new areas and disciplines that fall through the cracks. We're not rock stars. We're trying to be the de facto owners of all of the things, of speed, of UX, of security, of all these areas, like the webmasters of old With our unicorn horns and our hats and our multidisciplined, multifaceted skill sets. We're not the rock stars. In many cases, we are the janitors cleaning up the mess. And we're treading water. We're fighting to hold the dam in place like beleaguered superheroes trying to cover all the holes before the dam breaks. Everything keeps breaking. And the advice for dealing with this is often to make friends with people, or perhaps a little more cynically, to Use social engineering to succeed. Buy your developers beer, and they'll prioritize your SEO tickets higher. But trading in favors also doesn't scale. How many people do you need to buy beer for to get them to not mess up your tags or to not break that thing every release? How many people are there? How many hours are there? How many pints is that? How many dollars? That doesn't scale either. Social engineering is not the solution. And as a result of this mess, nobody really likes us, because at best, we're an annoyance. Chasing after the fact, telling people that they've done things wrong. We make things unnecessarily complex. We tell them how to do their jobs. We're the know-it-alls. And at worst, we're the people who spam, who irritate, who break the internet. That's not good. So I think not only are we not making the world a better place, I think quite often we might be the bad guys. And what are we achieving? A few more zeros on a few more businesses and more broken websites and the same issues over and over again. My issue isn't that I hate technical SEO. My issue is that I'm ashamed to be an SEO. I don't want to be the know-it-all smartass who makes a living telling other people how to do their jobs, telling them that they're not very good at their jobs. And I know that sometimes they're not very good at their jobs, but that's not the point. The point is it's going to get harder. The web gets more complex, SEO gets more complex, things will break more, and we're not doing anything about it. We're just continuing to say we will learn more things and we will save the day. We have to stop winging it. We need a system. We need a plan. I think that we are quite often the cause of these issues. It's not the developers. It's not the designers. It's not the content marketers. It's not the CEO. It's us. Think about every time a developer breaks something and you get angry at them. Think about every time a PR person doesn't include a link in a press release and you get grumpy. Think about every time we tweak a content writer's work to change the focus of the copy or introduce a keyword or a link And we get annoyed that they didn't think about it. Think about every time the PR team launches a campaign microsite, we tear our hair out because we were too late to fix it. We draw lines of ownership. We reinforce that we're experts in things that they don't understand. We make those things ours, and we make ourselves indispensable. And when we swoop in to save the day, to own all of the things, we prohibit or remove the need or desire for other people To want to own them. So they make the same mistakes over and over again. Of course the developer doesn't understand the difference between robots.txt and meta robots, because we're busy— too busy being awesome and too busy saving the day as these rock star unicorns to allow them to own it or to learn or to improve. We shouldn't be trying to own all of these areas. We should understand them, but they shouldn't be ours. We need to encourage other people to adopt parts of our thinking and our understanding. Control is not the answer. Every time we correct, behavior of others. They either rebel against that control and stuff still breaks, or they become subservient to us. And in our minds, that's often the best solution. The developer noindexed the site again. Well, next time, make sure I'm involved in the process. That's the worst outcome. We put ourselves in the way and we build these barriers which mean that now you've not fixed the root cause. You've just put yourself into the process and made it even less efficient. And you don't scale. You cannot scale. You can't fix all the things. It's not just developers. It's the same problem with journalists and PRs not understanding content-focused or evergreen content, or copywriters not understanding how to work in something like keyword density or TF-IDF, etc., because we are the gatekeepers for keyword data or content performance and analytics. So we've capped their motivation to want to get it right because we've put ourselves into their processes. It's the same thing. So we're clinging on to this SEO bit of the org chart, and we're trying to grab more and more of these pieces as they fall apart, when actually maybe things would be easier and better if other people started to take those bits on. We need to stop being rock stars. We need to allow other people an opportunity. Why now? So that's a big rant. It's particularly interestingly timed because I think there's a whole lot of interesting stuff happening out there. Which means that we need to tackle this pretty immediately, otherwise things are going to go horribly, horribly wrong. Who's familiar with Gutenberg in the context of WordPress? Some people. Okay, for those who aren't, here's a handy link. You can check it out later. Essentially, this is a work-in-progress overhaul of the content editing experience for WordPress sites. You'll see why this becomes relevant in a moment. In a nutshell, it's a move away from pages and themes to blocks of content. A paragraph is a block. A list is a block. A recipe is a block that contains images and lists, which are also blocks. Everything becomes modular and block-based. Why is this important to you? Even if you're on WordPress and using WordPress, that doesn't necessarily feel like a huge deal. Here's why. Google and the other search engines love Gutenberg. Think about how they're trying to transform the SERP experience, how they want rich card-based interactive results in the SERP, except they've got as far as they can to achieve in that world by just crawling and scraping websites. This is a search for how to change a tire. It's an example of what Google does today without Gutenberg, without anything special. They are just scraping that page. They've extracted the relevant information, they've formatted it relatively well, they've put a picture in, but it's not great. It's just some formatted content that's trying to help me validate whether this looks like a relevant result and a link I can click through. The world they want to get to is where this is an in-serve experience that talks me through and helps me to change my tire in situ. To achieve that, they need schema markup on the page. Everyone's familiar with schema. The problem Google and developers have with many websites, web pages, and content is that often the content of a page is just a big block of text and paragraphs. It's not structured. It's not formatted. For Google. Even if I have nice schema that says what my page is about, I've got a blob of JSON-LD in the head that says, this is a guide to doing a thing, the core of that content isn't well structured. It's hard for Google to understand the nuances of changing a tire when it's just reading paragraphs of text. So every page needs bespoke markup and tagging, and it all breaks, and it doesn't scale, and it doesn't work very well. So schema gives us all of these tools to say things like, this guide is nuanced. This is a how-to section. This is a step that has ingredients and recipes. If you want to get that into your— excuse me— into your code and your content, it's very, very difficult. A big blob of text like this doesn't have nice bits where you can mark up and add that kind of markup. It becomes very complex. You're relying on devs and multiple moving parts and so on and so forth. Why is this important? Because tomorrow everything changes. This is a result for SEO redirect Stack Overflow, and this is an example of Q&A markup. In the wild, specific markup for best answer. The highest voted piece of— highest voted response on that page has specific markup that flags it as the best result. That needs block-level schema. Google can only understand and extract that when that markup is on that specific block. It's not enough to have JSON-LD in the head and schema that says what the page is about. You need markup which says this component of this page is a specific thing. This is the world where Google want to get to. Why do I think that? Because they're keen on voice. OK Google, walk me through changing a tire is a crap experience, but only because the source material isn't well structured or well marked up. If all the guides to changing tires had block-level schema where the individual components were well marked up and well described to Google, they could do some really cool stuff. They could say, OK, do you have the user's manual? This will take 20 to 30 minutes. Here's some things you should do before you start, in a way that wasn't just scraping content from pages. Google needs Gutenberg to be able to do that. And we know this is where Google want to go and where they want to play because it's how they compete against Alexa and how they grow market share. I appreciate this might feel like a bit of a tangent, but here's where it gets really interesting. This is Google's sponsor stand at WordCamp EU in Belgrade in June, where there were a few thousand WordPress developers, designers, content people, et cetera, It's a huge conference. I saw a number of really interesting talks by people from Google talking about what Google are doing. They don't do that to us because they don't trust us because we break things. They talk to developers. I had a really interesting conversation with a whole bunch of them. Here's what I learned. This is the AMP team. To the SEO community, they are the web performance team. It's the same people. They see AMP and web performance as the same thing. Consider how big a deal that is. When they're so focused on performance— there was another update to the speed performance rollout stuff today— Google is throwing a lot of weight behind AMP, behind performance, behind trying to get the whole web into their way of structured content. This is a huge deal for them. If they can push AMP and performance further, it makes things like crawling and scraping and processing block-level markup much easier for them. It makes all the fancy stuff they want to do in a Gutenberg world much easier, much cheaper. All the computational overhead reduces enormously. This is their dedicated WordPress development and partnership initiative. They have a team who are working on and with WordPress to improve the platform. I met a fascinating woman there who's head of a new team dedicated to partnering with CMS platforms. She said the most incredible thing I have ever heard from Google. She said, for years we have worked with individual publishers one at a time to help them add markup, and never once Did we ask them what CMS they were running? And now they are asking. They've realized that their biggest limitations for moving to a more sophisticated block-level world is influencing people's HTML code. It's hard to do that one site at a time. Crawling is a pain. Fixing that is a pain. They've tried to deal with that through education, through carrots and sticks, and it just hasn't worked. They've realized they can have a bigger impact on the ecosystem by going to the source, by fixing the foundations behind the websites. All the conversations they currently have with and to and through us as webmasters and Search Console people, etc., will cease or diminish as they start to go one level further back. We're being cut out of the loop. This is a new paradigm. For Google to progress its rich interactive interact card voice-led performant intelligent world, they need block-level schema. To get block-level schema, They need Gutenberg, and they kind of need AMP. To achieve a broad enough adoption of those technologies, they need to work with CMS vendors. And now, for the first time, they're actively talking to all of the platforms. Except the team responsible for this has finite time and resource. They want to be able to move fast. They want to spearhead new initiatives. They want to put new schema out in the wild overnight. They want to avoid things like the headache of authorship, where they didn't get a wide enough or good enough adoption to make it work. So they want to work with the WordPress development community directly, specifically, to roll out new schema technology, new schema support, new technologies to 30% of the web. They expect the rest of the web will follow or migrate to WordPress because not having that kind of support will mean commercial suicide. Other platforms are already talking to them about adopting Gutenberg, yada yada, but they're behind. Google are specifically getting into bed with WordPress to make this happen. This will allow Google to fix the web where we haven't. We'll live in a world where increasingly websites just work, where they don't have errors, where they don't need fixing all the time, where they're more secure, and where technical SEO isn't really a thing anymore. We'll all live in a world where Google can parse and extract rich information from your site and provide great experiences in the SERPs and provide new experiences. This might feel like getting into bed with the enemy, but we need to understand that this is happening right now. These teams exist. These conversations are happening. And you can hide from that, but when your competitors adopt and get in bed with Google and WordPress and Gutenberg, you will be left in the dust. We need to change what we're doing from fixing websites to helping Google extract block-level content. And I bet a bunch of you are just sitting there thinking, this isn't my problem, it's too technical. I do content, I do PR, some flavor of inbound, and this won't really affect it. Well, the only thing which will differentiate your brand from your competitors is your product and your content. Your skills market is going to saturate because all the people who are currently fixing websites will need something else to do. We're going to move to a world that's all about content, and it looks like this. There'll need to be a huge emphasis on structured content. Think about things like recipes. Winning won't be— winning won't be about having the best websites, which it currently is in part. It will be about having the most structured, deep, well-block-constructed, well-marked-up recipe content, at least in part. And all the site management stuff which we currently obsess about Will cease to exist. So we need to find new ways of working. Don't react to this like an SEO. I'm not saying structured content is the new thing. I'm saying that this is a paradigm shift, and we need to consider collectively what we do about it. Now, what's nice about democracy is everybody can contribute, and at the moment, the web isn't democratic. We're all reinventing the wheel over and over again. That's why things break. It's why they fix. Why they break. Why they fix. The closest model we have on the web is the open source ideology. Ta-da! I want you. To adopt open source? Because WordPress and Gutenberg are open source. You can have a say in what it is and what it becomes. What if you took some of the time you're currently spending fixing things and reinventing the wheel and spent it defining and improving those open source platforms? Of course, some people will still have proprietary software, etc., but the balance is tipped. For the first time, Google directly getting into bed in the open source scene with WordPress changes the balance of WordPress will move faster than any other piece of software in the world. The web will improve. Those businesses will compete. They'll defeat their enemies, etc. Not being involved in that space is going to be difficult. WordPress has won. And here's something really scary. I only had these conversations with Google by chance. I literally walked into a conversation. In that whole conference of thousands and thousands of people and developers, I can count on one hand how many of them know SEO. Remember when we get angry at devs when they mess stuff up and we tell them off and it prevents them from learning. Gutenberg and the future of the whole freaking web is being built by armies of developers who we have explicitly trained not to know or care about SEO. We have messed up because you know what that means? They're going to mess it up. They don't understand how to build and manage websites in the real world. They don't understand the intersect of complex and emerging technologies and content, and they don't understand content marketing or link building or analytics or indexing or crawling or canonical tags or anything. They don't understand SEO. But you guys do. You understand the implications. You're starting to think about how complex this will be, how to resource it, what writing a recipe will look like in a future of block-level markup, the CMS requirements, how all of it will work. You see the moving parts. None of the people involved are thinking like this. So here's the pitch in 30 seconds or less. Use your superpowers for good, for our good, for the good of all of us. Maybe we can stop competing as SEOs and start collaborating. Because whilst we're fighting each other for top rankings and to master the latest tricks, we're going to get left behind as the web itself changes underneath us. This is your chance to fix all of your SEO issues for good. And if you don't wade in, it'll be down to me and Joost de Valk to essentially define how Gutenberg works from an SEO perspective, which is a ludicrous position to be in. A huge amount of power and responsibility that we don't want. That we should share, that we should all be involved in. The technologies that underline the whole internet are changing, and none of you are involved in the conversation. You need to be there. What does that look like? Get involved in WordPress. It's easy. Go to make.wordpress.org. Have a look. You don't need to be a coder. You don't need to be a developer. You can design. You can translate. You can contribute. You can have ideas. You can just wade into a conversation. Imagine if things like the XML Sitemap standard had been designed by committee, by people like us rather than people in isolation at Google, the web would be a better place. This is your opportunity. And I get that that sounds scary. I'm new to this space too. I'm new to this way of thinking. But I can't overestimate how easy it was to get involved. This was my first WordPress core track ticket. I spotted a performance issue with how DNS prefetching worked. I didn't write a line of code. I just described the problem. Some other guy wrote a patch, and I sped up 30% of the internet by 50 milliseconds on every request. I made the web faster. That's really cool. Now, what's interesting about that isn't that I made the web faster, it's that it was easy. It was straightforward, and all that it took was a bit of SEO knowledge that these people don't have. I get that WordPress isn't for everybody, but find other ways to do this. Stop being the SEO and trying to own all the things and start to find ways to fix the root cause, to democratize, to involve other people, and not to tell the developers off and to get into their processes, but to invite them into— take your thinking and help them understand the rationale underneath. Consider when you last tweeted Will Critchlow from Distilled and asked if you could add a chapter to Distilled U. Consider when you shared an open-sourced piece of documentation that you wrote about why site speed is important. We're all doing the same things over again, and we're not contributing outwards. We're not collectively making SEO a better place. We can build bridges between disciplines in a way that nobody else can. Stop Stop fixing your problems and start fixing our problems. Take all of that time you're investing in fixing the same stuff over and over again and fighting and fix the web. Because if we don't, then the developers behind Gutenberg and WordPress and Google will do their own thing. And they have their own vision of AMP and a whole world of nastiness where they haven't even thought about SEO. They don't know what they're doing. So let's optimize us. Thank you very much. Thank you.
