2025 WiFi Money Predictions

What to expect going forward

The year 2024 is finally coming to a close.

It feels like it was just yesterday that writing ‘month/day/2024’ on forms felt futuristic and surreal. Now you’ll feel old-fashioned and out of touch when you accidentally write the same thing this coming January.

The Earth just keeps on revolving around the Sun.

It really ain’t stopping.

Wild stuff.

ANYWAY, it’s been a crazy year for SEO. Tons of despair, but the people who were open-minded and willing to actually try did fine.

Here’s what I think 2025 will bring.

More emphasis on user signals in the algorithm

The old Google algorithm was heavily weighted towards two things: domain authority (i.e. links) and topical authority (i.e. lots of content about the same topic).

The new post-HCU Google algorithm still heavily rewards domain authority. This will never change (links are literally baked into the foundation of how search engines work), but now topical authority has been replaced with user signals as the #2 part of the algorithm.

Topical authority is still a ranking factor, but it’s been demoted to a more minor part of the algorithm.

AI killed the idea of topical authority as king.

For a (very) brief window in time, anyone could rank a website by spamming mass amounts of AI-generated content. It was a disaster that obviously couldn’t continue.

Hence the HCU.

Which managed to kill off anyone who was following the old-school, low-effort style of SEO (not just people spamming AI, although they were wiped out as well).

Now you have to actually do the thing that’s so difficult for autismos of the SEO community: Think about your users.

Google now wants to reward sites that already have preexisting traffic.