Mordy Oberstein on Old vs. New SEO, Google Rank Volatility, and an Era of Refinement

Once upon a digital time, SEO was a lawless frontier—and Google, a well-meaning sheriff still figuring out which horse to ride. Links were gold, keyword stuffing was coinage, and your site could rank #1 by sheer audacity alone. Fast-forward to 2024, and the landscape resembles less a boomtown and more a carefully landscaped suburb: pruned, optimized, and under surveillance. But new doesn’t always mean better—just ask a magician after the invention of electricity. 🧙‍♂️⚡

Enter Mordy Oberstein, a man whose wit about the ever-chaotic world of SEO is only matched by his ability to expose the profound ironies in how we interpret volatility, algorithms, and the peculiar brand of hope known as Google updates. As head of SEO branding at Wix and co-host of the SERP’s Up podcast, Oberstein has become a scholar in the art of ranking disorder—and perhaps, its reluctant bard.

The Great Divide: Ancient SEO vs. Modern Strategy

Once, all a page needed was 400 words, three repetitions of a keyword—preferably in bold—and a link from a shady Brazilian directory no one dared click. Those were the days… when spamming your way into Google’s good graces was not unethical, but almost pragmatic.

Now, SEO is driven by entity recognition, semantic relationships, and user intent so complex it might require a Jungian analyst. We’re in an era where algorithms read between—not just the lines—but the margins of digital behavior. The game has gone from crude arithmetic to nuanced interpretation. Content is no longer king; it’s a billable therapist dispensing relevance to anxious bounce rates. 🧠📉

“We used to optimize for crawling,” Oberstein jokes. “Now we optimize for comprehension.”

That shift is seismic. Where old SEO was about shouting loudly in a crowded room, modern SEO is more akin to whispering in the right ear. A whisper that says, “I understand you. Please don’t click back.”

The Labyrinth of Rank Volatility 🔄

Every morning, SEO professionals awaken to their dashboards and pray they see green arrows. Google ranking fluctuations—once dramatic but infrequent—now behave like wildfire: less an act of God, more arson by data scientists. According to Semrush Sensor, average daily SERP volatility in 2023 increased by over 30% compared to 2020. In Oberstein’s words, “Volatility is the new normal. The stable moments? That’s the anomaly.”

The irony? As Google purports to refine its search experience, its updates often leave search professionals clutching their schema markup like a talisman against chaos. One month celebrates helpful content, the next rewards EEAT, and the next punishes listicles unless authored by Pulitzer nominees.

Google insists this is all in the name of “user-first relevance.” That’s adorable—like pouring a martini and claiming it hydrates.

An Era of Refinement… or Sanitization?

“Refinement” is the word du jour. But refinement can feel like reduction in disguise. For Oberstein, modern SEO isn’t just about meeting algorithms—it’s about matching Google’s ever-shifting projections of human curiosity. That’s not refinement; it’s a psychological thriller masquerading as a tech discipline.

Consider the tone shift: where marketing once embraced the raw saturation of keywords (“Best blue widgets UK 2020!”), refined SEO now serves its value in porcelain cups, with schema tea and NLP biscuits. Yet the user often still wants what they always did: a clean answer—and maybe a coupon.

“Google wants the SERP to be the endpoint,” Mordy says. “Not the launchpad.”

Thus, featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, knowledge panels, and an unrelenting progression toward zero-click searches. For SEOs, it’s a cruel bit of irony: the better your content, the less reason people have to visit your site. 😐🔍

The Human Behind the Algorithm 👤

What sets Oberstein apart isn’t just his command of data. It’s his refusal to dehumanize what is arguably the most cognitively-demanding branch of digital marketing. SEO, as he sees it, is inherently a people strategy masquerading as a technical exercise. The purpose isn’t to speak to algorithms in code, but to make human needs legible to machines.

And what of content creators caught between ever-changing goalposts? They cope. Much like farmers adapting to a climate altered by unseen forces, SEOs must plant content with an eye on both the soil and the sky—between Google’s automations and the user’s caprice. 🌾📊

Coda: Where Does This All Leave Us?

There’s an unshakeable paradox at the center of SEO culture today—an antithesis worth savoring. We are urged to think like humans, write like poets, structure like engineers, and predict like oracles. We are supposed to remain calm while being told nothing is stable, then blamed for outcomes that are rarely fully in our control. And still… we persevere.