Want More Attention? Google Shows Why Almost No One Deserves It
It turns out Google is getting better and better at mirroring humans
We love thinking that our effort entitles us to people’s attention.
We can spend hours planning and writing an article, waiting for the perfect moment to take a picture, or tweaking the sound balance in a piece of music. But when all we hear back is crickets? It’s tempting to get hacked off with the world.
Here’s the thing: being ignored isn’t a judgement. It’s a system response.
And, like most people, I didn’t really appreciate this—at least until a big mistake I made when I started in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
I’ve been an enthusiastic photographer for as long as I can remember. Until recently, I’d never tried monetising it. But in mid-2025, I thought I’d fix this by launching my first-ever business: a print-on-demand Shopify eCommerce store, both for some extra beer money as well as to flex my SEO muscles.
After all…how hard can it be to get to the top of Google?
Yeah. If you’ve ever worked on such a project, you can stop laughing now.
It turns out I’d pitted myself against…well, other eCommerce businesses. Businesses for which “low web traffic” is a death knell; businesses that have entire teams of experienced professionals dedicated to SEO.
And up against them was myself, a one-person shop with expertise in photography, trying to attract customers by writing about interior decorating.
I’d brought a stick to a fencing contest.
I wrote blog post after blog post. I spent hours researching and writing about things I knew hardly anything about. “How to select living room art that tells your story.” “Canvas prints vs posters: which suits your space the best?” Etcetera.
And whenever they failed to surface on Google, the same thoughts went through my head. “Is my writing terrible?” “Does someone at Google hate me?” “Have I been shadowbanned on Google? Is that even a thing?”
It’s one thing being ignored by people. We can just blame them for having lousy taste.
But when we get ignored by algorithms, we don’t have anything to hide behind.
Still, it’d be easy for me to say, “The Google algorithm is just busted”. But the more intellectually honest thing to do would be to appreciate: it’s just doing what any human would do. It’s ignoring me until I’ve made a persuasive case that I’m worth paying attention to.
The great part of that? Control of the situation is mostly mine to take. The more I accept the situation, the more I can do to fix it—if I so choose.
Google is a mirror—and the reflection isn’t always kind
Here’s a lesson every SEO beginner learns almost immediately:
Google isn’t malfunctioning; it’s ignoring you because that’s what it thinks humans will do, too.
Google doesn’t have feelings. But its entire business model depends on it being able to predict how humans will feel about something. And its success over the last 20 years suggests it’s doing a pretty damn good job.
Transposed for humans, it goes like this: When people ignore you, it’s not out of malice.
It’s out of efficiency.
This loosely translates to, “Your content is being ignored because it’s a waste of time.” Is that harsh? I’d say so. But every one of us has a limited amount of attention. Or, in the words of the immortal scholar Mark Manson, “we all have a limited number of fucks to give”.
And yeah, that’s also true of Google.
Even at the speed of a supercomputer, just scale it up to every site on the internet. You’ll still see how Google needs to economise with the number of fucks it gives.
At the end of the day, if Google doesn’t give a fuck, it’s because it thinks humans won’t give a fuck either.
People trust patterns, not proclamations
There’s a concept in SEO called “Topical Authority”.
Google will try to infer your “authority” on a subject from the quality of your writing. But it isn’t just trying to understand your expertise.
It’s learning your behaviour. It’s watching to see if your actions are consistent over a long period of time.
And you know what? People are doing the very same. Imagine seeing a blog with 100 posts. Suddenly, you notice that each of the posts was published in the space of a week, and that nothing new had been published for a year. How does your view of it change? Your brain clocks the inconsistency before you’ve even read any of the content.
Ultimately, we don’t trust someone just because they say they’re an entrepreneur, a photographer or an engineer.
We trust them because they can prove it to us through their content—and also their behaviour over a long time. We trust them because we believe that their behaviour, and their results, don’t just look like luck.
And that’s why starting anything—be it a business, a craft, or a reinvention—is so brutal. It’s because you know who you’re becoming before everyone else does.
But no one else, whether that’s algorithms or humans, will change how they see you without enough data points.
“Topical authority” is just Google’s way of imitating something deeply human: You’re only believable when your actions stop looking like an accident.
It’s not as unfair as it seems
The point is so important it bears reemphasising.
You’re not being overlooked. You’re being misunderstood because your output doesn’t make your direction obvious.
It could be the quality OR the quantity of your output. But the simple fact is, to position yourself as an authority, you need to sustain both over a long time.
Ultimately, we can interpret the lesson as, “If no one is paying attention, it’s because you haven’t given them a reason to.”
We can invert this. “If you give people a good reason to pay attention, they will.”
In SEO terms, it’s easy to back this up with data. Consider this: 96.55% of pages on the internet get zero web traffic from Google at all.
Here’s the uncomfortable extrapolation: most of us haven’t yet built anything worth paying attention to.
The benefit of this reframe? Being ignored is the starting point of any identity. And if you’ve been stuck in that stage for a while, it’s not personal. It’s just a data point saying you haven’t figured out how to really communicate what you are to everyone else yet.
Cutting through the noise
Here’s one place the Google-to-people simile breaks down: over time, Google is getting better at picking out flimsy content.
Humans, on the other hand, have always been great at it.
Especially now that the internet’s getting chock-full of AI-generated content, you have two choices. One is to fight fire with fire and be the loudest person in a very noisy room. Most social media gurus out there are teaching people to just “post more” and “engage more”.
There’s some truth to this.
But the other choice is to produce signal. Show the world that you’re a person; that you have an identity and a mind that is worth people’s attention.
The reality is you need a combination of both.
Noise without signal = spam.
Signal without noise = a potentially well-crafted persona that no one notices.
The goal? Enough of each that you can get a real identity out there.
It’s not a fast process, but that’s the point.
Attention isn’t something you win by shouting as loudly as you can. It’s something you earn by making your identity unmistakable.
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