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Nicolas Sartor

About me

I am Nico (Nicolas Sartor). I'm currently working as a Staff Engineer: an engineer who figures out the design of systems, breaks it down, and coordinates with teams to get the big thing built in small, deliverable pieces.

Where my SEO experience started

But, in another life, I used to run a few websites, ecommerce stores and random blogs.

That was back in 2015, when my SEO experience started. Back when everybody was telling me I had to find the bad backlinks, add them to robots and disavow them. Back when keyword stuffing still kinda worked.

One of them was RedondoRangeHoods.com, a dropshipping store. I used to target specific range hood model names as keywords: super specific long tail keywords with very low volume, but also very low competition. I got a few sales that way.

I remember getting my first site to rank for a few top keywords, and I was so excited about getting traffic.

Coming back to SEO while AI changes everything

Fast forward to now, I am coming back to it: re-learning a lot of things that changed, noticing the things that didn't, and looking at what is currently happening with AI and how that is affecting SEO for everyone. From scaled content and anti-spam policies, to the SERP changing shape again, with even less visibility for true organic content.

And also noting all the hypocritical Google policies, like "AI content must be human reviewed", while they tell me to eat a lot of rocks for nutrition.

What this blog is

This blog is not only one of my experiments, but also an outlet for my thoughts, and reports on things I find that work well. And of course, looking back on things I thought worked well until they didn't.

I think that is the true SEO experience.

That huge dopamine hit you get seeing the Google Search Console chart skyrocketing... only to see it fall back down to 0 after a year or two, then wondering "what the hell did I do wrong this time?".

To make it clear: I don't run an agency. What I'm doing is for my own projects and my own business experience.

What I'll write about

As a Staff Engineer, I also want to get into:

  • the algorithms and machine learning of search engines
  • the effects of AI
  • how to properly use AI for SEO
  • and from time to time, a cool project I worked on, like indiedex.gg, a search engine for games on Steam. I tuned it to find hidden gems. Wish Google would do the same.

I also want to write about the future of software engineers. LLMs are getting better and better at code, and are now capable of decompiling binaries and reverse engineering all software. So many things will change about ownership and delivery, about how software gets built, and about how IP can be protected. And about the cyber security risks of all software now being accessible.

Projects

List of niches

Tool — A searchable list of niche and micro-niche ideas, for anyone picking their next site.

Posts

Find me

Support my work

Everything here is free, with no ads. If a post or a tool helped you, you can buy me a coffee.

Buy me a coffee

Now, ladies and gentlemen, let's do some SEO while Google tries to end us.