Anyone here a current/past SEOBook Subscriber?

I am not only a current subscriber, but I am also a founder.

So I'd certainly say our community is smaller & less active than it was a few years ago.

There are a variety of reasons for that...

while we have some ad agencies and large ecommerce and news publishers & such among our client base, our primary target audience was the independent affiliate types. or, another way of saying it, is if you indexed the industry composition & compared our member base against it, our membership base drastically over-represented the more knowledgeable & experienced independent players while under-representing newbies and big brands.

my old business partner (I stopped doing much consulting work outside of running SEObook due to burnout) listed some of the SEO client projects we worked on here
clientsidesem.com/about-clientside-sem/
I didn't work with him on all those, but I did work with him on a few of the big projects he listed there. but most the people who subscribed to our site were affiliates, independent smaller ecommerce sites & those sorts of folks.

before Penguin & Panda came out, SEO was quite easy to scale and succeed with. and many things could almost be set-n-forget. over the last 4 or so years SEO has grown far more expensive & harder for sites/companies which are not already well known (many ways to die with all the animal updates, manual penalties, the cheap cost of negative SEO, etc.)

SEO is much harder to succeed with today if done in isolation on a site which is not already known, particularly if you are in a fairly competitive market.

I think Sugarrae stated it best when she wrote something like "Google wants to rank popular websites, but Google doesn't want to be the reason a website becomes popular."

it is one thing to build rank, but it is another to maintain it! and as maintaining rank has grown harder & more expensive, a lot of people who have remained competitive and had plenty of time to discuss things are using up a lot of their time with their heads down furiously working.

there's been massive churn within the broader SEO industry over the past 4 or 5 years.

think about how in Q4 mobile drove nearly half of Google's search ad revenues in the US. mobile is harder for end users to convert on in most businesses and the search ads have a far higher CTR relative to the desktop search results due to the smaller screen size of cell phones. then in some categories (like hotels and ecommerce) they've also launched vertical ads which further displaced the organic result set.

in addition to that click mix shift toward ads over organics there's also been:
- more and larger ad extensions
- a rebalancing of the remaining search traffic distribution toward larger known sites & away from smaller independent sites
- the rise of the knowledge graph / scrape-n-displace program which tries to keep users on Google rather than having them click through to a search result

and over that time period I've moved a few times, stopped going to conferences, blogged less frequently (I think my last public blog post was about 2 months ago), etc. I used to do a few interviews in the mainstream media too. I remember our old landlord sending me an excited email about being featured in the WSJ.

but really all those sorts of things I haven't put as much emphasis on recently.

if you are venture funded you need to grow or you will get fired. but as a smaller company you are not required to grow endlessly & can shift your priorities.

so if you are a small company and are not advertising & are not doing much push marketing then it is quite likely broader market awareness of you will slide over time. and there are knock on effects from that sort of stuff. when there are "top 10 xyz" lists and the like, you might not get mentioned in those as much anymore. fewer interview requests from journalists. the page Wikipedia had for me was deleted & in the "debate" section multiple douchebag Wikipedians suggested the normal notability requirements were not applicable in my case because I am a marketer & any of the normal signals of notability were in my case just proof of a marketer marketing.

some sites are built to grow & flip as an exit. other sites are built more to be lifestyle businesses. I've never really wanted to create a huge business.

a couple years ago I was in a bit of pain (couldn't even walk for a while / was going around the house on all 4s for a few days). when that happened I decided to seriously adjust my priorities to move health up my list. I typically exercise a couple hours a day now & am in far better shape than I was back then.

part of what made me love SEO a decade or so ago was how accessible it was. you could really easily drastically change people's lives for the better with it. over the past few years Google has increasingly shifted SEO from being about "what" to being about "who" - turning search "relevancy" into an exercise of confirmation bias.

that sort of shift (along with that health issue I had) certainly impacted enthusiasm to some degree & it became much harder to trade in my health for faux celebrity.

a lot of new industries might start off somewhat pure with quite open sharing and so on. then as they get more saturated and developed they become more cutthroat, the suits come in, people get more fake/plastic, and a lot of the early people to the field don't care as much to be associated with it. over the past few years many of the most talented SEOs (sugarrae, graywolf, john andrews, etc) who ran blogs for many years have cut back on their blogging quite a bit.

in a typical market (governed by market principles, rather than monopoly) if someone invests in innovation & discovery then shares their results publicly, perhaps in some of those cases the sharing is appreciated, valued, leads to positive economic outcomes, etc.

whereas in search (governed by monopoly, rather than market principles) the reward for sharing something publicly might include being called a cynic or spammer, having the technique/strategy copied without attribution & renamed/resold as something new (in some cases by the very person who denounced you as a cynic and/or spammer), and that technique/strategy being arbitrarily & selectively cut off by Google & turned from a positive ranking signal into a negative ranking signal.

from when I got started to maybe 2008 there was perhaps significant economic incentive in being known as an SEO, but if there is one today it is diminishing by the day as the polarized propaganda view won out (as reflected in the above bit about the wiki).

Thank you for your answers. I hope you were not offended by my questions.

So do you plan on keeping the forum going indefinitely? Are you still doing seo actively for clients? And if the forum is smaller, does that mean individual users get more attention from the mods?

How much helpful it is for a user?

Based on that post, I don't think you'd be a good fit for our site.

Well nothing lasts forever. Over a decade is a long time to be in one line of business on the web.

We may at some point change our business model.

I am not sure what that might look like though.

Certainly not as many as in the past...the above bits about passion and health are pretty fundamental.

Yes and no.

Our forum has always been rather high touch with heavy involvement from the moderators. But some of our customers are highly skilled too, so with a smaller base of users there are some questions which might be harder to answer. For example, if someone had some Wordpress-related questions I could likely answer a lot of those, but I don't have experience with Joomla & the odds of having a person who has ran through the exact same Joomla issue as another one being among the pool of members & seeing the question to answer it goes down if the membership base is smaller. And there are some local or cultural issues which can also be harder to answer with a smaller membership base. For instance, I know we've had multiple members from Australia or South Africa or Israel or New Zealand, but I am sure there are many countries in Africa & Asia where we've never had a single subscriber from. And there are other specific issues with ecommerce platforms, subscription sites, and other sorts of business aspects maybe not tied directly into SEO which become harder to have a great answer for without a broad base of participants.

One other thing worth mentioning is someone might sign up and ask 40 questions in a day, to where it is clear they are not implementing any of the advice they are given or even fully reading the lengthy answers given. Typically those people quickly end up getting ignored because while people want to help others, if they see the same person asking the same question again after the just spent 15 or 30 minutes answering that question they tune out.