SEO is not dying, but bad SEO is - Krešimir Ćorluka

don't jump on bandwagon, keep to the fundamentals and don't trust anyone including myself, keep experimenting, run your own projects and just see what works and what doesn't. Hi, I'm Crashmirt Choluka and this is SEO in 2026, additional insights. Crashmirt what's your number one SEO took for 2026? I've got a lot of them but my main one is that SEO isn't dying, bad SEO is dying, especially with all of the things going around AI right now I think that people shouldn't really jump on every gravy train they see. Bad SEO is dying. Okay, so what is bad SEO? Well, seeing how people, most people do SEO, I think your podcast is listened to by like really advanced people but maybe not so much beginners or people who are in the intermediate range, maybe people who have businesses of different kinds, maybe it's even like a bigger business but they're not really in the SEO world. I keep seeing with clients and with people we try to help, we have like communities where we try to help people. The basics are still kind of iffy with most people. I always get surprised how many people use like really bad SEO moves constantly, even though they're in the business for a long time. So it's like using even stuff that's 15 plus years old like cloaking, metakewords, maybe tiered, backlinking, just a lot of stuff that doesn't really work and I think that these changes that are happening currently are going to make websites that do these kinds of things. It will just be painfully obvious. You're not going to have a good time if they don't fix that. Okay, so old ways of cheating Google is a thing of the past and if you're just thinking of algorithms as opposed to users, that's probably bad as well. Yeah, yeah. But I think that it's not just like the old ways, there's some like new ways which are kind of old and new at the same time just because the AI, like the LLMS, the GPT perplexity and so on, they're really new and they keep doing the same mistakes that Google did way, way, way before. It's a new technology in a way. So things that used to work with Google now kind of work with AI and people try to play on that, like doing, I don't know, listicles which isn't like black hat by itself, but it kind of is in a way or trying like to cloak stuff and so on. Like people keep using these really old techniques that Google fixed a long time ago with AI's because they're just really new and they don't really know how to deal with this stuff right now. I mean, listicles can obviously be potentially original content as well, but I assume that you're talking about listicles that are just creating from other third party content and just maybe generated using AI as well. Yeah, I'm talking mostly about like creating listicles specifically to rank in LLMS which does work like using different AI visibility tools which kind of give you a list of citations and then you go through the citations and you contact everyone there or can you put my tool, product or service, whatever inside the listicles people pay for those positions and then they get mentioned in LLMS a lot more. People also do like really artificially made listicles as well. For instance, like a week ago, I searched for the best SEO company in Croatia, best SEO in Croatia just just to see what will come up. Usually me and my colleague Tindjodajka come up, but this time some people have never even heard of came up, which is kind of strange because we know pretty much everyone who deals with SEO at an advanced level in Croatia and the citation was from some Indian blog, someone made where it's like an SEO and then a city SEO, Siri and the names just sound like really fake. So it was probably made by someone who is expecting SEO is to contact him just to buy for a position there just to be listed as the number one or number two or whatever. So you essentially saying that these tactics work now, but they're not going to work for long. Yeah, yeah. It's just like in SEO. I keep seeing people doing like these black hat or gray hat techniques, which kind of work for a while and then they get shut down. Just recently I had a client who put on like the review schema structure data and the reviews weren't third party. So Google thought of them as possibly fake, but they put the review schema on every page if I remember correctly and they had a drop down in clicks, impressions, positions and so on because it worked for a while and then Google just checked it. Okay, this sounds fake. It pushed them down. So people who tried to game the system like, okay, it's okay to game the system if you have like some kind of a pet project or something, but anything that's really serious or if you have a serious client, I wouldn't really recommend doing stuff which works right now but doesn't work in the long term. So I would keep to the fundamentals like learn the fundamentals really well and then just keep doing stuff that's within the fundamentals. So like you said, keeping track of what users want, what their intentions are, having a great user experience, which is also really important because Google does use chromium click stream data for rankings at least partially. So just to be a good response to an intent and not trying to game the system too much, you can get away with a little bit but don't base your strategy on it. How do you establish the intent? It depends like we have like the four or five main intents like commercial transactional and so on but also there's like microintents in every search or in every query prompt whatever. You can look for what pages rank for that specific thing on other websites but you can also kind of check people also ask data. You can check what people search for in relation to that query most often. So what are the entities that are connected to it? There's multiple ways. I think one of the best ways is just kind of going by the vibe of it. I haven't really had any need to go really deep into it. I mean, you can if you especially if you have a huge website but it's mostly like if someone searches for something which is quite obviously commercial, don't try to rank with a blog for it if it's obviously informational, don't try to rank with a product for it and so on. With some people try to do like trying to rank for an informational query with a category page by just having a huge basically like blog at the end of the category page. You talk about sticking to the fundamentals but obviously the fundamentals can change as well. What fundamentals that were good practice maybe five years ago aren't so important now and what what fundamentals have become more important and you foresee is becoming even more important of the coming couple of years? Well, I don't know if I could think of any fundamentals that really depends on what your definition of fundamentals are. I can't really think of anything I think of as fundamentals that has changed. Maybe for a while like technical SEO did go down for a while in importance, let's say, we could think of that like a change in the fundamentals but with the coming of AI technical SEO became way more important than ever. I don't even really remember if technical SEO was ever this important. So that did kind of change in a way where it became more important to stick to one specific fundamental than the other way around. But the fundamentals for me are really, really simple. It's like make your website easy to use, answer the intent of the user in a natural way. So you're not trying to game the system, make your website so it can be crawled by different agents in a way where it sees the most important stuff first and then the less important stuff later. It's maybe a little But I keep seeing people going against the grain on this stuff. Even though it's really general, maybe even common sense in a way, even though I don't really want to offend anyone, but it is how it is. How do you stay on top of what works best? I kind of track what's new in the news, and also I experiment with stuff. Some stuff is more like grey hat. Like if I see a good technique which doesn't really stick to my fundamentals in a way, I can try using it on a client or a project and just to see if it works. I don't really trust anyone, and whenever I have, like, some sort of education session or something similar like a workshop, I always tell people not to trust anyone, including myself. I'm just trying to give people information on what I've seen, but I always encourage people to experiment on their own, because without experimenting, you're not really going to get reliable data. There's too many factors. Like someone says, "Okay, if you put this in the title, or if you put this in the code, or if you make this sort of backlink, you're going to go up in positions." But there's so many factors that we don't see. Like the industry, the backlink portfolio, the rest of the backlink portfolio, or we don't see if the company they're working for has done something else, like maybe invested in PR generally or in TV commercials and so on. So I kind of experiment on my own websites, on my own clients, with stuff like this, but I'm really careful with what I put in. If it's a little bit gray-hat, I have a degree of letting it be. Like, let's say the most common example would be, if it's something related to, like, backlink. So if we check what kind of backlinks the first three results have, like the anchor texts, and then we try to replicate the anchor text ratio of those, that's kind of gray-hat. It's not really natural, but it's not really, like, uncommon or really like going against, completely against the fundamentals. It's kind of in a gray area. But generally, I would just say experiment on your own websites. If you don't have your own websites, create some projects, it's easier than ever. You can create something in a cloud or whatever, and just check what works. Even the black stuff, the black hat stuff, you can kind of check it out, and see if it works or not. I like your answer about experimenting. I think every decent SEO needs to have their own websites and side project that they can experiment on. I like your answer as well, about not trusting people as well. It sounds quite negative on the face of it, but the reality is, is that you don't know where the information or advice comes from, and it might not necessarily apply to your situation. So unless you're willing to do the work, to do the research, and get your own independent verification, that piece of advice is relevant to what you intend to do. It's perhaps quite dangerous to do it for you, and certainly, you're more dangerous to do it for a client. You've also talked in the past about things like Reddit SEO as well as obviously, the listicles that we've talked about in this conversation. If upon doing your research, you find that there's a referring medium, like Reddit, that's really effective for one particular client. Do you jump on that bandwagon if you think that you can drive a lot of traffic or is it best to be a little bit more conservative and just stick to the fundamentals knowing that there are going to be peaks and troughs in referral traffic from different sources, and you can't necessarily control everything? Yeah, of course. I would be more careful. Although, if it makes sense, like, if it's connected to the fundamentals from what I've kind of explained, so if it's helping the users, then I don't really see it as a bandwagon. It can be a bandwagon in the sense that when people saw that AI keeps citing Reddit, different forums, Quora, and so on, they just jumped on the bandwagon. Of course, we have to have 10,000 bots which respond on every thread which is connected to our services, tools, and products. Then they had, like, a blowout. But I think it became more obvious even to SEOs that online reputation management is not only connected to branding, but it's also now connected in a really serious way to SEO generally. So I wouldn't say that it is a bandwagon in the sense if you try to game the system, but if you're just now realizing, okay, we keep getting mentioned in Reddit comments and so on. In a negative way, we need to deal with that in some sort of way. So online reputation management is important. And also we can kind of, which was an SEO technique, which is an SEO technique. But I'm not sure how many people use it. So checking, let's say, Reddit, Quora threads, and so on, to see what kind of pain points, problems, questions, people have about your specific product or service, which can then help you create content on your own website, which is increasingly important to have everything laid out on your website. So, LLMs don't have to search for information elsewhere. Let's say for pricing. If you don't have pricing on your website, which is obvious, which is like a pricing page somewhere, which can be really easily accessed, then maybe LLMs will pull something, some comment from Reddit, which is basically lying about your prices, let's say, or overestimating or whatever. So it's really important to check all the boxes to kind of deal with online reputation management as well, because that's now becoming a really important part of SEO. That's one of the things I'd say that has changed in a serious way. So it's not like it's always been that way in a way, but now it's way, way more important. -Rashmir, what's the key takeaway from the tip you showed today? -The key takeaway would be don't jump on bandwagens, keep to the fundamentals, and don't trust anyone, including myself, keep experimenting, run your own projects, and just see what works and what doesn't. -Don't jump on bandwagens. Crashmir or Churluka is CEO at the Canonical SEO Agency. Find out more over at Canonical. But HR, Crashmir, thanks so much for being part of SEO in 2026. -Thank you very much for having me. -I've been your host David Bain. Get your copy of SEO in 2026, the book over at SEO in 2026.com.