Organic

When I hear the word organic, two thoughts immediately come up: organic search and organic chemistry. The latter comes up because it is ingrained in me that organic chemistry is one of the hardest subjects in university. The former is because of my blog and how Google made my website quite popular many years ago. For the uninformed, Organic search results:

In web search engines, organic search results are the query results which are calculated strictly algorithmically, and not affected by advertiser payments. They are distinguished from various kinds of sponsored results, whether they are explicit pay-per-click advertisements, shopping results, or other results where the search engine is paid either for showing the result, or for clicks on the result.

Of course, I started the blog with no idea of PageRank, search algorithms, SEO, etc. I just wanted to keep an electronic journal during my PhD and I wrote mostly for myself. Over time, I became a little interested because I was curious why some of my blog posts would rank higher (many times the 1st result) than the official documentation. I have never really used SEO; I have some WordPress plugin that has SEO in its name but I installed it because I was curious.

In SEO terms, organic means unpaid rather than paid advertising, which is funny to me because it just makes me think that I'm a sucker for doing things naturally because I don't make any money from it. (I know that's not what it means but just saying that reading "organic means unpaid" gives me that association.)

SEO is the reason for the initial decline in your Google search results because of Goodhart's law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

People paid a lot of money to optimise their websites so they would be ranked higher than others; Google's search algorithm stopped working because people were gaming it. I'm not sure what people are doing nowadays but I'd imagine that they would want to optimise their websites so it would be included in AI summaries, prompt results from ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini, etc.

Google has always controlled the front door to all websites; the other alternate to people discovering your website is via social media. I haven't used social media in a while because it stopped feeling natural to me. I feel like true organic discovery on the modern Internet is purely accidental. And it is for this reason I wrote this blog post.

The last couple of days I've gotten additional traffic to my blog because I was mentioned in a notable person's blog post. To be honest, I am very flattered and had not expected that they would read my blog. I have pretty much shifted away from writing technical blog posts, which is what this blog is known for, to random musings and I didn't think anyone was still reading. I had even noticed that every time I wrote some random muse, I would get somebody unsubscribing from my blog.

One positive effect of getting less attention on the blog is that it is liberating. I can truly write in an organic way because I am a human and while I don't care too much about judgement, it still affects me. I can be goofy, sentimental, and imperfect. I can just be myself and be comfortable with it, which is not an easy thing to do. To me, this is what organic really is: something that develops naturally and gradually, without any external influence.

This blog has been around since 2010 and keeping it going seems like a silly endeavour. I wouldn't actually advise anyone to keep a blog unless the motivation is truly intrinsic, e.g., you find that writing is rewarding and helps you think. If you do decide to start one, you should expect that you won't get much of an audience (and it is very difficult nowadays to promote a website). But know that making meaningful connections does justify the whole effort...