Not only is our site not accepting new paid memberships, but about a year ago I literally canceled all active paid subscriptions & refunded any unused portions for those who had longer duration subscriptions.
People change, markets change.
SEO was for a significant period of time a meritocracy. In some corners it still is, but if you are a company of say 2 or 3 people & you tire of being on the conference scene it is very hard to rise above the industry noise and have anything unique to say after you wrote thousands of blog posts for a decade plus.
If you have dozens of employees an individual or two can scale back & have it not kill the business. But if you are a business of a couple people and you are burned out, then the business dies.
Our site relied on an extreme degree of passion to offset a lack of resources. Once the passion faded so too did the site.
Another issue is that I put tons of effort on making our community work well from within the site (having made over 30,000 forum posts in addition to the thousands of blog posts, monthly newsletters, feature guides, etc.) but the flip side of this is ... this line of thinking & approach only works if one or more of the following is true
a.) the market you are in is growing
b.) the market you are in is not yet saturated
c.) you get a lot of word of mouth marketing
Numerous subscribers of our site explicitly informed me that they viewed the site as too important of a competitive advantage to want to share it. That is sort of business model death. Further, when I first got on Facebook forever ago I said add to about anyone who asked to friend or such. And so whenever I logged in suddenly there would be a bunch of messages from people in say Bangalore. And so I would quickly log out.
So if I am not particularly active on the conference scene, I blog less frequently, I write more dense stuff that most people consider too complex or too off message, I don't scale up hiring other employees, and I spend most the "social" time behind a paywall & don't spend much time on other sites ... the business model is ultimately broken.
One other expansion on this concept is if you sell access to a tool / software program then you can share whatever tips or information or guides you want publicly to promote it & it does nothing to harm the value of your tool offering. But if your actual product/service/etc. is selling knowledge, then you are limited in what aspects of it you can give away while still having retained enough to keep your members better informed than the broader market & have enough that you can justify charging for it.
That said, the stuff I wrote on the homepage I also believe to be true. It wasn't just that I felt the business model of the particular site had died, but I believe SEO is at this point a negative sum market.
A broad recession is needed to clear away a lot of stuff & leave lots of new openings in markets...just like Google grew out of the dot com boom crash & Facebook grew out of the global financial crisis recession
I am not saying I am a promoter of AMP or I think all sites need to use HTTPS.
Rather those are the sorts of messages Google is trying to convey.
And, at this point, it should be flagrantly obvious that they are willing to sacrifice relevancy to drive business objectives.
Anyone remember when Google+ or Google Checkout were baked into AdWords?
That's one way to drastically oversimplify a collection of complex thought processes.
Another perspective though ... is there anyone who started before I did who blogs as frequently as I did for as long as I did? I mean I guess there are a few BUT most of those would be people who usually shill for Google.
Or that of a burned out person.
Also one of my friends who I also consider a mentor walked away from the game a few years before I did.
There is a concept called selection bias.
The people who were spending thousands per year to participate on an exclusive forum were likely not spending much time on free forums. And the people spending lots of time on free forums likely felt paid forums didn't make much sense. At the core the main part of our membership site was the user forums, but we also had a monthly newsletter & wrote guides on various topics.
The site began as a blog because I could see blogs got a disproportionate share of link equity back in 2003. It sold an ebook on how to do SEO & kept that model until SEO grew complex enough to where writing a single linear guide made little sense because it would take too long for most people to want to read it all. I then broke the book down into topical guides which were hosted on our training subdomain & then updated them + added new sections on algorithms like panda or penguin or such. We also offered some tools, but ultimately since we had such a small company I thought trying to compete with other companies with dozens or hundreds of employees was going to be a losing proposition. Most of the value of our site was the forum. But all forums or communities have some level of attrition & ultimately I didn't spend enough time/money/effort to offset churn & feeling somewhat burned out I didn't want to double down on effort at the expense of my health or keep running the site if it kept growing less active...so I thought it made sense to simply shut it down & spend more time reading & doing other things I enjoy like video games & such.
I am kind of glad to be out of SEO as I perhaps did it for too long & let it become too much of my identity. I'd like to do something more artistic or creative but probably need to take at least another year or two off to reset my mind.
