If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing culture. Less and less people browse search results and when they do it's more often to glance at the rank-0 result or click an ad. In general SEO being a zero-sum winner-take-all game makes me reluctant to even play when there are alternatives.
The new SEO is optimizing social media. Your visitors and customers are out there, you can talk to them, they can talk to you. You either create a following or pay an influencer to rent their following. In a way this is like going back to the old days of promotion and marketing where you'd go door-to-door to sell. Nowadays the web is saturated and filled with so many scams that word-of-mouth and being associated with a trustworthy face has become important once again.
Exactly. The web of yesteryear where you could make a living one-manning a website is practically gone. If you told me 20 years ago that I'd pine for the days of blogs, I'd have laughed. Now who's laughing...
This statement is so blatantly wrong that it actually put me off even reading the rest. Spreadsheets are stronger than they've ever been and are never going away, let alone being "outdated." Sure there are products that claim to be "the next spreadsheet" but most of those actually serve a different purpose: no-code app dev.