Authenticity is an increasingly valuable asset. For SEO, writing, marketing... everything. You can’t fake authenticity. You can’t steal authenticity. It immediately generates a competitive advantage that your audience will embrace.
Embrace authenticity. If you work on a project or with a brand that pushes you away from authenticity, push them back. Fight for it. If they resist you should leave. They’re doomed to fail, and you have a chance to do something amazing.
Google confirmed a normal search ranking algorithm update was released late last week. This is newsworthy because the SEO community has seen massive shifts in organic traffic (both positive and negative) that correlates directly to this change. According to Google, this was a standard update, and wasn’t initially communicated to a wide audience because Google believed it would have a negligible impact on results. Google also confirmed the updates was not related to BERT, and reaffirmed that there’s no way to “optimize” for these types of updates. You just need to focus on “good” content. Easy, right?