The unintended consequences of making SEO “for everyone”

At Yoast, we had one mission: make SEO easier. For a long time, SEO for everyone was Yoast’s tagline, and we meant it. We helped millions of people optimize their content. We made technical SEO more accessible. We gave small businesses, bloggers, and creators a real chance to be found online.

And we were successful. But that success came with side effects. In trying to democratize SEO, we also helped shape habits that led to a web full of “optimized” content, not all of it valuable.

What we got right

A lot of what we did still matters. The readability checks in Yoast SEO were Marieke’s idea, rooted in her belief that to get as big an audience as possible for your ideas, you need to make them more easily understood. We hired a team of language scientists to research and build them. They were grounded in years of academic work on what makes text understandable, including shorter sentences, clear transitions, and active voice. These principles are still incredibly relevant, especially in an AI-powered world. 

For instance, we also talked about paragraphs needing to be about one topic (and not too long), with a clear use of headings throughout. SEOs now talk about this and then call it “chunking.” They talk about writing for LLMs as much as for people. But the truth is, this was always about helping readers make sense of content. And it still works.

We also introduced inclusive language checks. That wasn’t about SEO rankings, it was about making the web, and your content, more welcoming. And that still feels like one of the most valuable additions we made.

The deeper foundation

Some of the best things we built were grounded in ideas older than SEO itself. The structure of a good site comes straight from librarianship, from research on findability and classification, and from the craft of organizing knowledge so others can discover it.

Those principles guided how we thought about internal linking, content hierarchies, and sitemaps. They’ve lasted because they weren’t based on trends. They were based on how people find and make sense of information.

What we didn’t see coming

But not everything we did aged well. We turned SEO into a checklist. Our traffic light system, meant to encourage good habits, became a finish line. People wrote to get the green light. They optimized, published, and moved on. Sometimes they were writing with purpose. But sometimes, they were just filling in the blanks.

We encouraged more content, more optimized content. And we made it easy, maybe too easy. That led to a flood of articles that hit the right technical notes, but didn’t always add real value. In our effort to make SEO accessible, we also helped normalize quantity over quality.

We did try to combat the over-optimization; we introduced keyword distribution checks to see if you stayed on topic. We warned against having a keyword density that was too high. But, in hindsight, I don’t think we did so strong enough, for which I’m sorry.

The myths we helped create

Here’s a perfect example:

“Articles should be at least 300 words, because Google wants that.”

Google never said that. I said that.

There was some logic to it. Most algorithms need a little content and context to understand a topic. But it wasn’t deeply researched. It was a practical rule of thumb that got repeated until it became gospel.

And suddenly, people were writing to hit a number. Not because their story or idea needed that much space, but because the plugin suggested it. 

The tide has turned

Today, that old playbook no longer works. Publish often and optimize hard? That approach is outdated. At the recent SMX Munich conference, half the talks were about pruning content, removing over-optimized articles, and merging similar articles into fewer, stronger ones.

It’s now clear to everyone there, it seems, that search engines and AI systems favor clarity, structure, and originality over repetition and keyword stuffing. The focus has shifted from more content to better content.

And I think that’s the right direction.

What I’ve learned

The tools we build shape the web. They create incentives, workflows, and habits, some good, some not.

The parts of our strategy that stood the test of time were the ones grounded in real research: readability, findability, and structure. Not the tricks or shortcuts. The fundamentals. The stuff that just makes people build good websites. That’s where I’m focused now.

Where I’m going from here

With Progress Planner, we’re building tools that support thoughtful website SEO strategies. Tools that don’t just help you publish, but help you manage what you’ve already written. Tools that reflect the full life cycle of content: writing, improving, and pruning.

In the previous release, we added nudges that’ll help you set up Yoast SEO better, configuring things that matter, but that we know people often get wrong. We plan to do this for more plugins.

In the upcoming release, we’ll remove features that reward volume for volume’s sake. We’re doubling down on usefulness, clarity, and long-term website performance.

Because SEO for everyone is still a goal worth pursuing. But it has to be the right kind of SEO.