Or: The Time We Learned That Gemini Knows Less About SEO Than Your Grandma
The Legend Returns
Let’s be honest—when a seasoned SEO walks into the room, people lean in. And when they bring a list of SEO myths so persistent they’re basically the cockroaches of the digital marketing world, you listen.
Last time the SEO community gathered, we had the legendary GEO vs. SEO debate that broke the comments section. And by “broke,” I mean people actually had opinions about something other than what they had for lunch.
The Great GEO vs. SEO Panic
Here’s the thing—people are out here thinking they can just skip Google and build their entire strategy around generative AI. But here’s the reality check:
“Trying to get into GEO and pretend that you can bypass Google is ridiculous and very, very dangerous.”
Building an LLM infrastructure to catch up with Google would cost about a trillion dollars. Trillion. With a “T.” That’s not a startup budget—that’s a “we’re going to need a bigger boat” situation.
And the worst part? Companies are out here risking their main domains on these sketchy strategies. The advice? Go buy a $12 domain if you want to experiment. Don’t torch your million-dollar brand because you wanted to see if AI could find you in the dark.
The Myth That Google Is A “Content Appreciation Engine”
Let’s clear this up once and for all: Google does not care about your feelings. It doesn’t care that you spent 47 hours crafting the perfect 5,000-word masterpiece. It’s an algorithm, not a literary critic.
“Just writing good content is not going to get you there. I am not advocating writing bad content, right? I assume that most people set out to create good content.”
Spoiler alert: Most people don’t. They set out to create “good-enough” content that’s really just a word salad with some keywords sprinkled on top.
AI Thinks It Knows SEO (It Doesn’t)
This is where things get spicy. People are asking Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini for SEO advice, and then actually using it.
“LLMs, especially Gemini, understands SEO.”
The response: Absolutely not.
When we asked an LLM for SEO advice, it gave back a list of myths so outdated they’d make a 2010 SEO blush. Here’s the breakdown of what the LLMs are getting wrong:
1. “You Need A Great Tech Stack”
No, you need a website that works. That’s it. Google doesn’t care if you built it on Wix or hand-coded it in assembly language. If it loads and Google can read it, you’re fine.
“You can’t make a file more crawlable… either your page is deliverable or it’s not.”
2. “You Need EEAT And Author Bios And Citations”
This is classic “confirmation bias because it sounds attractive.” Translation: People want to believe that their 6 months of SEO experience + a well-crafted bio = authority. It doesn’t.
3. “Backlinks Don’t Matter”
Oh, they absolutely do. But not in the way you think.
The Backlinks Situation (It’s Complicated)
Here’s what people get wrong about backlinks:
- You don’t need them for every page.
- You don’t need to add them forever.
- You’re probably losing them faster than you’re gaining them.
One graph showed WP Beginner’s traffic collapse—from 2.6 million clicks a month to 32,000. That’s not a decline. That’s a nuclear meltdown. The backlink profile? New links coming in, old ones disappearing. It was a losing battle.
“You can absolutely start a site with cornerstoneing… but you will eventually run into a brick wall where you cannot rank anymore without external authority.”
The Toxic Backlinks Myth
Remember when Semrush added “Toxic Backlinks” to their dashboard? The reaction was basically:
“I just sent feedback going: this is rubbish.”
The general consensus is to ignore them—many experts haven’t disavowed a backlink since 2013. Unless someone is spending €50,000 on a negative SEO attack against your gambling site, those “toxic” backlinks are about as harmful as a paper cut.
The 30-Day New Site Strategy
If you’re starting a new site, here’s the battle-tested playbook:
- Get as many links as possible—even from X profiles (they don’t count, but it’s good practice)
- Find low-difficulty keywords and publish answers to “People Also Asked” questions
- Create an HTML sitemap (not just an XML one—Google ignores new XML sitemaps)
- Publish 10+ articles minimum (if you can do 30, go for it)
- Link to your HTML sitemap in the footer AND body text—get authority to it
- Use it to replace robots.txt and LLM.txt—it’s more useful and human-readable
“You could have a page about your product and say, ‘click here is our product overview table of contents’ and it’s just a page of links.”
This isn’t just SEO—it’s helping AI understand your site too. Two birds, one stone.
The Parasite SEO Reality Check
People think they can just post on Medium or Reddit and suddenly rank for everything. The truth is:
“Parasite SEO is a hack if you know SEO very well. If you don’t know SEO, it’s just going to fail.”
Want to make it work on Reddit? You need two accounts, a well-framed question, and the ability to buy upvotes. Not exactly beginner-friendly. And even then, you’re fighting against content cannibalization and click-through rate history.
The One Thing You Should Actually Do
If you’re a business owner drowning in SEO advice, here is the core piece of wisdom:
“Publish your content. Write it. And if it doesn’t rank, unpublish and republish.”
That’s it. No fancy tech stack. No author bios. No schema markup obsession. Just: Publish, test, revise, repeat.
“If you’ve got a hundred pages that aren’t getting clicks… I think that retargeting them is a good idea. You don’t have to rewrite the content.”
Final Thoughts (From The SEO Oracle)
The takeaway is that SEO is still the unicorn channel—it’s where people discover your brand, evaluate it, and buy from it. And with the rise of AI, it’s more important than ever to understand the fundamentals.
“I think ideas are dangerous in vacuum chambers. They need to be tested. Just because something is new doesn’t mean that everything has changed. The fundamentals remain the same.”
So go forth, publish content, test your relevance, and for the love of all that is holy, stop asking Gemini for SEO advice.
TL;DR: Backlinks still matter, toxic backlinks don’t, Google doesn’t care about your tech stack, LLMs don’t understand SEO, and you should just publish, test, and republish until you figure it out.
Want to watch the full beatdown? Check out the podcast and prepare to have your SEO beliefs shattered.