A post doing the rounds on LinkedIn this month tells business owners to build a page on Google Sites and link it to their website. It won't help. Why it won't help is the most useful thing you can learn about SEO: Google is trying to show people the result they were looking for, and it has spent more than 25 years getting very good at not being tricked.

The advice doing the rounds

The idea goes like this. Make a free page on Google Sites named after the search you want to win. Put your business on it and link to your website. Some people go further and call it "Google stacking": Google Docs and Sheets full of links, all linked from a Google Site, on the theory that anything on Google's own domains carries extra trust. Gig sites sell it as a package for a few dollars.

It sounds clever because it uses Google's name. Here's what Google has actually said:

• On Google Sites, John Mueller of Google said in 2023 that the pages can be indexed but the platform isn't ideal for SEO, and suggested using your own domain instead.
• On building links from Google Sheets, back in 2017, his whole answer was: "Don't do that, do something useful instead."
• On "trust" from Google's own domains, he said in 2021 that Google has no metric specifically for trust. There's no special pass for being on sites.google.com.
• On links you create yourself on free platforms, he said in 2020 that this kind of activity has zero value for SEO.

We looked at a public Google Sites page. Its outbound links go through a google.com redirect. How Google treats those for ranking isn't public, and I won't pretend to know. It doesn't matter much anyway. A page nobody visits, linking to your site, is not a reason for anyone searching to want your page.

What Google is actually trying to do

Google has one job when you search. Put the result you were looking for at the top, so you're happy with Google and come back. Everything else is machinery for that. Here's what's public about the machinery.

It reads the web, then picks

Google's own explainer splits Search into three stages. Crawling: Googlebot finds pages through links and sitemaps. Indexing: it works out what each page is about, groups duplicates and picks one version to keep. Serving: when someone searches, it ranks what it has by relevance and quality, adjusted for their location, language and device. Not every page makes it through. Google also says it doesn't take payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher.

Lots of systems, not one score

Google publishes a list of its ranking systems. It names more than a dozen: BERT, MUM, RankBrain and neural matching for understanding language; passage ranking for finding the right part of a long page; freshness, reviews, original content, reliable information and site diversity; deduplication; and SpamBrain for spam. Links are on the list too: link analysis and PageRank, which Google calls one of its core systems from launch. One system among many, not the whole game. A Google engineer, Gary Illyes, told a conference in 2023 that links aren't in the top three things that matter, and in 2024 that Google needs very few links to rank a page.

It learns from what people pick

This is the part the tricks ignore. In the US government's antitrust case against Google, the judge's 2024 ruling describes a system called Navboost. It pairs searches with pages by remembering what people clicked, using about 13 months of search data. A Google document quoted in the ruling calls Navboost one of the most powerful ranking components it has had. A related system, Glue, does the same for everything else on the results page. In 2024 a set of Google's internal API documents leaked too, with attributes named goodClicks and badClicks. Google warned against reading too much into them, and nobody outside Google knows how much each one counts.

You don't need the weights to see the shape. Google watches which result people choose for a search, and whether that choice seemed to do the job.

And people check the results

Google also has people outside the company, its search quality raters, rate results against a 182-page set of guidelines. The main question they answer is whether a result fully meets what the searcher needed, or fails to. Google says no single rating changes any page's ranking. The ratings tell Google whether its changes are making results better, so the whole system gets tuned towards the answer a real person would call right.

Why every trick has the same flaw

Every SEO trick fakes a sign that a page is the right answer, instead of making it the right answer.

• Links used to mean somebody vouched for you. So people bought them, swapped them and built networks of sites to make them. Google built SpamBrain to spot both the sites buying links and the sites selling them, and says it neutralises those links.
• Keywords used to mean a page was about something. So people stuffed them in. Keyword stuffing is now a named spam policy.
• Dates used to mean a page was fresh. So people changed the date without changing the page. Google's guidance on helpful content lists exactly that as a warning sign.
• Big websites rank well, so people rented pages on them. In 2024 Google made that its own spam policy, and later said it applies whether or not the big site is in on it.

Google earns its money because people trust its results. A trick that works is a bug in Google's product, and Google has every reason to fix it. Even when one works for a while, you're building on something you'll lose, and the page you made in the meantime did nothing for the customer who landed on it.

The rubbish, one by one

What actually works

Be the result the person was looking for. That sounds like a slogan, so here's what it means on a Tuesday morning:

1. Find the searches you deserve to win. In Search Console, look for searches where you already show up but people don't click, or where you sit just off page one.
2. Answer the search in the first lines. Someone typed a question. The first sentence of your page should answer it, with a number if there is one.
3. Cover what a reader expects. Read the pages that already rank and note what most of them explain. A reader will expect yours to explain it too, where it's true for you.
4. Add what nobody else has. Your real prices, your photos, your numbers, your answer to the question customers ask you on the phone. This is what makes Google's systems, and the person searching, pick you over the five pages that say the same thing.
5. Make sure Google can read it. No accidental noindex, no answer hidden in an image, a page that loads fast on a phone, links to it from your other pages.
6. Get talked about by real places. A local paper, a supplier's page, an industry list. One mention from somewhere people read beats a hundred from places nobody does.
7. Judge it properly. Wait four weeks, then compare the page's clicks with the four weeks before, against how the rest of your site moved. If everything rose 20%, your change didn't do anything you can see.

None of it is a hack. It's slower to explain and faster to work, and nothing Google ships next year can take it away from you.

Why I built Dinkum this way

Dinkum does that list, one change at a time, five mornings a week. Each change is a Dink: a pull request on your own site that you approve or close. Then it judges every Dink at 14 and 28 days against the rest of your site and tells you plainly whether it worked.

Its rules also say what it won't do. It won't build pages on Google Sites, Medium or Google Docs to rank in your place. It won't build rings of sites linking to each other, and it won't use indexing services. That's not because we're saints. None of it lasts, and none of it helps the person who searched.

Everything above you can do yourself, and our guides give away every step. Start with how Dinkum works, or how to get named in ChatGPT, which runs on the same idea: be the right answer, then make it easy to find.

Every job I've ever had has ended with me fired, made redundant or in a spot where I had to leave. It took me years to see it was making me free. Dinkum is what I built with that freedom: SEO work that gets done five mornings a week without anyone standing over it, from a company that's easy to fire.

Every job, one way or another

I've been put on notice, pushed out, made redundant, and I've walked away from a company I started. Not once or twice: all the way through my working life, every job I've had has ended one way or another.

The warehouse. I worked in a Woolworths warehouse and refused to follow one of the safety rules, because I thought the rule itself was unsafe and it made no sense. The managers pulled me up and I was put on notice. Afterwards, they changed the rule to the one I'd suggested.

The Friday night push. At a company that made form software, I was told to push a complicated release on a Friday night. I offered to do it first thing Saturday morning instead. That made me "not a team player", and they set about getting me out. I was by far the most productive person in that company, and it didn't matter.

The client that left. Another company lost its biggest client, and I was made redundant. Nothing I did at my desk that week could have changed it.

My own company. Even a company I started ended for me. We had competing views of the future: I wanted to build something like beehiiv and Substack in one, and the people I started it with didn't. So I left.

For a long time I took all of it personally. You start to wonder what's wrong with you. Somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like failure. Each time I lost a job I also lost a boss, a set of rules I hadn't written and somebody else's idea of what I was for. What was left was the work I could actually do.

What getting let go teaches you

• Being right won't keep you the job. The warehouse ended up with my rule. I still got put on notice for it.
• A job is someone else's decision. It can end because a client walks, in a meeting you weren't in, for reasons that have nothing to do with your work.
• Keep your work portable. The skills you build and the things you make are the only parts that come with you.
• If you can see it, build it yourself. The only way to make the thing you believe in is to own it.

The ultimate freedom tool

Dinkum is what I built when I stopped looking for the next job. Every weekday morning it reads a site's Search Console data, checks what Google and the AI answer engines say about the business, picks the one change most likely to help, makes it and sends it to the owner as a pull request. One change a morning: a Dink. Then it checks, at 14 and 28 days, whether that Dink worked.

It doesn't need me in an office. It doesn't need a manager to sign off its week. It just runs. And nothing it makes goes live as a surprise late on a Friday: every Dink waits as a pull request until someone has looked at it and approved it. That's freedom for me: a business that does its work whether or not anyone is watching, and a job nobody can make redundant.

It's freedom for the people who use it too. The owner who'd rather run their café or their clinic than learn what a canonical tag is. The founder who's sick of paying a retainer for a monthly report. Nobody should have to give up their evenings to SEO, or hand their search traffic to an agency and hope.

A company you can fire

I've been on the wrong end of it enough times to know how it feels, so I built Dinkum to leave the power with you, not us.

• Nothing ships without you. Every Dink is a pull request you approve or close.
• Month to month. There's no contract to get out of.
• Your first five Dinks are free, and they're yours to keep whether you stay or not.
• Money back for the first month. If you join and aren't happy by the end of it, tell us why and we refund it in full.
• Every change lives in your own code. If you let us go, nothing leaves with us.
• We give the methods away. Guides like how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business show every step, so you can do all of it yourself.

If it just happened to you

If you're reading this the week after you lost a job: I'm sorry. It's rough, and it doesn't help much to hear it might be the start of something. But every time it happened to me, it pushed me a bit closer to work that was mine. It didn't feel like that on the first Monday. It did later.

These days the only people who can let me go are my customers, and that's how it should be. Dinkum has to earn its place every morning. If it doesn't, you can fire it. Dirk, for the record, says he got the boot from a Nokia 3310 and never looked back.

Dirk is the snake in our logo, and he's the one doing the work. Most software is forms and tables, and most AI looks things up. Dirk decides what to do, does it, checks it, and learns from what happened.

Who Dirk is

Dirk Dinkler is the pixel snake from the game on the old Nokia phones, the one that goes round eating dots and getting longer. He's our logo, chasing his own tail. He's also the name for the part of Dinkum that does the work.

The dots he eats are opportunities: a search people have started making that nobody answers well, a page that's losing clicks, a broken link, a question ChatGPT answers with someone else's site. Every weekday morning he goes after one. On the weekend he sleeps.

Forms, tables and lookups

For as long as I've built software, it's mostly been forms and tables: a screen to put information in, and a screen to see it again. Even the clever stuff waits for a person to come along and drive it.

A lot of AI hasn't changed that as much as it looks. It finds things faster, writes a first draft, or passes a job between a few tools. That's useful, but someone still has to decide what's worth doing, do it, and check that it worked. Dirk does all three, on his own. Here's what that looks like.

What Dirk does

1. Dirk starts the work

Nobody opens Dinkum and presses a button. Every weekday morning Dirk wakes up by himself, looks at the site, and works out what to do. Normal software waits for you. Dirk turns up.

2. Dirk decides

On any morning there are dozens of things he could do. He weighs them against each other, picks one, and writes down why, including what he turned down and the reason. You can read his thinking for every change he's ever made.

3. Dirk knows the business

He keeps a notebook for every site: what's true about the product and the prices, how the brand talks, the searches he's going after, and everything he's tried. He reads it before he writes a word. If a page says something the notebook contradicts, fixing that comes first.

4. Dirk makes things

What he hands over isn't a recommendation. It's the change itself: a page written for a real search, a comparison, a free tool, even pictures drawn in the site's own style. No two mornings look the same, because the site, the searches and the competition keep moving, and he works from what's in front of him, not from a template.

5. Dirk checks his own work

Before anything reaches you, a second AI reviews the change, the pages are built and looked at on a desktop and a phone, and a check confirms he only touched what he's allowed to. Most mistakes are caught there, before they get to you.

6. Dirk finds out whether it worked

Two and four weeks after a change goes live, he measures those pages against the rest of the site, so a busy month can't make a weak change look good. Every change gets a verdict: it worked, there was no clear change, or it made things worse.

7. Dirk learns from the answer

The verdicts go back in. Each kind of change keeps a hit rate, and the hit rate weighs on what he picks next, so the work that moves a site gets chosen more often and the work that doesn't, less. Every Dink that works, he grows a little. That's the Snake part.

8. Dirk waits for your yes

Everything up to the last step is Dirk's, and the last step is yours. Each change arrives as a pull request you can read, question or close, and nothing goes live until you approve it. He's a very polite snake. Autonomous doesn't mean unsupervised.

Why it feels different

Put together, it's less like using software and more like working with someone. You tell Dirk what you care about, say a page for every platform you support or every city you serve, and he works through it a step at a time alongside everything he notices by himself. Some mornings he does something I wouldn't have thought of. That's the part normal software can't do.

I don't think he's finished, and I don't think it's only an SEO idea. It's what software looks like when it can do the job, not just hold the information about the job. You can see what his mornings look like in my first post, and how Dinkum works goes through the machinery.

Dinkum is the thing I've always wanted to make, and it's only now possible. The response has been far kinder than I expected, and I'm still working out what to do with that.

The thing I've always wanted to build

I've made a lot of things. Dinkum is the best of them.

It's also the one I always wanted to make. For years I could describe it but couldn't build it: something that does the search work on a website every day, properly, instead of sending a report about what someone should do. Now I can, and it's better than the version I used to describe.

What it does

Every weekday morning it does one piece of work on your site. I call each one a Dink. It reads your Search Console, your pages, what AI tools say about you and your sales, then picks the one change most worth making that day: a page for a search people are making, a fix for something that's wrong, a sharper title on a page that's nearly there.

Then it makes the change properly. A second AI reviews it, and the pages are rendered on desktop and phone before you see anything. It arrives as a pull request, and nothing goes live until you approve it. Two and four weeks later it checks whether the change worked against the rest of your site, and that answer shapes what it does next.

If you want the details, how Dinkum works walks through them step by step.

What it looks like

This is my own site, in the dashboard Dinkum runs on. Open any of these to look around.

The feedback has been more than I expected

People have been really positive about it. It's a bit overwhelming. I didn't see it coming, and I'm not going to pretend I'm used to it.

Dinkum is beating my own expectations, and I set those pretty high.

What's next

Keep making it better, one Dink at a time. The changelog shows what's shipped lately. I'll write more here as there's more to say, including the parts that don't go well.

If you'd like to see what it would do for your own site, the first five Dinks are free and yours to keep.