disinterested.blog

**This was written months ago and published from the archives.

That is poetry for computers. 

Sitting upstairs with my landlord, we chatted about AI. He shared a podcast and we speculated on what it might do in the future. How do we use it now? 

It’s a useful tool for the moment but the more I use it to write, the less personal “flavor” my writing has. I use little chunks from it here and there and it’s feedback provides some excellent learnings. I was able to even use the internet-connected version of AI today. It was interesting to watch the AI … Search… Browsing … on-that-website.com … and then come back and answering makes me wonder if that is all for show. Why wouldn’t it be able to index it all immediately….

I was working some SEO for the blog(s). When I was stiff armed by the infamous Robots.txt. Robots.txt is the code in your website that tells a search engine how to interact with and index your website. It’s what allows the search engine to boil down the content on the website to show results on SERP:

All this including the thumbnail. And without the ability for the search engine to do that, you end up with this: 

How embarrassing.

The Fix?

I found some helpful articles that allowed me to change the Robots.txt. Here’s a lengthy but informative article on how to optimize. The fix for my issue – The “Disallow: /” tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site. Remove the “/” or anything after the Disallow and you’re crawlin’! This fixed my immediate issue, but overall SEO related to Robots.txt is a bit more complicated than that as it lets you optimize your crawl budget. Check out that article for more info.

It’s Crazy…

…to think that the evolution of this digital marketing, performance marketing, SEO, fugazi, marketing is really about to be absolutely turned on its head by results (AI) engines. 

So is it all worth it to learn it all right now? 

Will robots take over? 

Is it ironic that robot.txt is the gateway to websites?

? 

Yep. 

On this side 

of the digital world, from your perspective i.e. you looking through your computer and at me on the other side in the real world. I was able to come up with some SEO content strategies for the blog.

It’s time to create some content. You need the content to funnel people to your product. Content is KING.