I've been playing the website / SEO game for about 13 years now. I peaked in 2013 when I could race any new content to the top of google in less than a day.<p>But first, have you ever heard the humorous story that goes something like this?... (condensed)...<p>A business man visits a 3rd world native fisherman while on vacation at some exotic place. The native fisherman is fishing in the story, being interrupted by the biz man.<p>He gives the native advice on how to scale up his operation, which goes about 3 or 4 levels deep, where its obvious the native will do nothing but work heavy ambitions for the entire prime of his life.<p>The native asks leading questions, like a child... "and then what do I do? ...and then what do I do?"<p>And the story ends where as a reward to a life well planned and lived the native can go fishing every day in some exotic place and enjoy his leisure time.<p>I've found a similar humorous outcome in web design.<p>I've learned several languages for the web, practically worshipped the god of SEO, and structured my pages in such a way that almost every service could properly represent the content on my page (ie, microdata, structured data)<p>... and after all of this ... I finally realized the obvious...<p>How did I ever miss this very very basic truth: Some of the most popular content on the web doesn't give a #### about any of this.<p>Beyond that, webcrawlers and search engine algos probably don't care that much either. (and yes, I say this as an experienced web dev)<p>So now I'm back where I started 13 years ago: Fishing in my native village by means of websites that are built on simple HTML, lightweight, and completely abandoning the higher theories previously mentioned.<p>Has anyone else taken this path? I'd love to know how its gone for you.