You can't just create a random site with some content and rank now.
Google is looking more for "real entities".
That doesn't mean you have a 'brandable domain'. It means you are a genuinely real entity with something unique. They are looking for EEAT.
I see many small sites still doing well, but they're not just faceless blogs. I won't share any here because small ones are too affected by shares, but there's one site for example that's a cat blog..
They are DR 11, with 165 RDs. Started in 2021.
565 pages on ahrefs globally. 236 if you set country to the US.
They sell real products.
They have a water filtering dish, some supplements, brushes.. Total of 16 products.
They also do a grooming kit where they package some stuff together.
They seem to have some other products outside their main shop. Mugs, clothes, laptop sleeve etc. These are obviously just every day objects they've had printed with their branding and cats.
Their brush/cat bowl etc seems to be THEIR OWN. It's got their branding on it. Whether they manufacture this, or just stick a logo on a generic one I don't know. The products look high quality..
They have an affiliate program.
A facebook, instagram and youtube. They actually make some youtube videos. Small channel with 300-600 views per video. Their instagram has 22.8k followers. Their facebook has 4.5k followers.
They are a real business and it's obviously quality. You can see this is not a blog created by a guy looking to MMO, who did some keyword research, hired a writer from a forum and tried to rank.
They have a media kit. They have patents & trademarks.
They have a careers page.
They have a shipping information page.
A refund policy.
Compare this with a typical "cat blog", that just has 100's of low quality AI generated articles or thin human written articles, a privacy policy/terms of service, and some google ads slapped all over the page.
It's not that hard to make some data points and train an AI to detect the higher quality businesses.
Google are in fact not trying to push out small businesses. They're trying to push out thin/useless sites made for search engines, not users.
This business is clearly made for people, not search engines..
Yes, we all want to make money, but you do have to start thinking about making a BUSINESS for people, not a site for search engines.
They will also not be super reliant on google. They'll get a lot of sales through instagram, maybe they run some ads, and they'll have a good email list + word of mouth.
I would say that "make money with SEO" is dead in 2024..
But "supplementing a good business with organic search" is alive and well.
You can still create just a purely informational blog with not much else and rank. And whether your content is AI or human makes ZERO difference. Google don't care, and they're not running detectors. I know, because I'm doing fairly deep research for my own model training, and as part of that research I look for sites under DR 30 that are ranking well, AI sites that are ranking well, and human sites that are ranking well.
What I can tell you about the under DR 30 sites, is almost all of the ones ranking well that I'm seeing have EEAT signals that are apparent to me as a human.
They just LOOK like real businesses.
If you want to rank a purely informational type site you need deep, informative, topically-tight content.
Ie, not a site with 10's of thousands of thin AI generated pages targeting questions, jumping from one topic to another.
But rather, an AI generated site that has longer, deeper, highly factual, dense articles that cover every aspect of every micro-niche within a niche. This still ranks and it ranks VERY well.
