User-Centric North Star Principle
The final test for any tactic: if no search engine and no AI model existed, would you still do this for the person reading the page?
Analogy Mental model
The house rule of a shop that lasted a hundred years: honest goods, honest measures. You kept it whether or not an inspector was coming, and that is exactly why it lasted.
In practice What you actually do
When a decision is genuinely unclear — will this popup hurt rankings, is this paragraph keyword stuffing — reduce it to one question: if I were the person urgently looking for this answer, would this help me or waste my time? The answer is almost never ambiguous, and it settles most arguments without needing a study.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
The tactics that require a study to justify them are usually the ones failing this test. Every technique in this collection exists to serve one plain outcome: helping the people who need you find you faster, and giving them more than they expected once they arrive. Rankings, traffic, and revenue follow from that. They are not a substitute for it.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →