A site that will behave as though SEO is dead
Everyone keeps saying it: SEO is dead. So, why adhere to best practices anymore? Guilty Gamer is a website that doesn’t want to track you, sell your data, sign you up to a newsletter, or sell you anything in our store (there’s no store to speak of). Nope, Guilty Gamer is something of a nostalgia project, a love letter to simpler times that focuses on the content and creators, not branding, sales, SEO, or any of that other faff.
Guilty Gamer aims to return to the core of blogging, all the while having fun doing it.
Remember when blogs used to be fun, offering unique styles and opinions that set them apart? That’s what Guilty Gamer is aiming to offer: content created by fans for fans, hitting the inside baseball topics others skip over, the fun topics, the interesting topics, with a veteran in the industry leading the site in the opposite direction of the targeted SEO that covers the front pages of the mainstream blogs.
So, despite how bad of an idea it is to proclaim, Guilty Gamer aims to go against the grain by creating a site that is focused on fun, honesty, and a good old-fashioned morality; the site absolutely exists as an island for all the techies out there who feel abandoned by modern gaming and general tech coverage, precisely what Guilty Gamer aims to cover.
However, with the rise of AI, the industry is changing rapidly, and independent blogging has been getting crushed by Google. So, with the demise of Google Search along with SEO, something new will inevitably rise from the ashes. At Guilty Gamer, our bet is on humanity and its creativity filling a much larger role as the AI bubble expands beyond the point of annoyance.
That’s not to say AI can’t be helpful, which is why Guilty Game leans on AI for some of its art (an example at the top of this post from Gemini, even our logos are made with AI), for the intention of keeping costs low while saving time (and to keep up with the Joneses).
This is why there are no ads on Guilty Gamer; not only would they ruin the clean aesthetic, but they wouldn’t earn enough to bother with in the first place.
So, the big idea is to create a site that prioritizes the user experience over monetization, going back to the drawing board with something simple and user-friendly, thereby avoiding many of the annoyances the web is filled with these days. Once the site is humming along, we’ll then figure out a palatable way to keep the lights on should this idea of a user-first experience blossom into something fruitful — and, most importantly, organic.
In other words, we won’t hijack your software keyboard to try to get you to sign up for a newsletter, there are no pop-ups about cache, we won’t ever ask you to sign in with a Google account, and forget ever needing to share your ID. In fact, we aren’t interested in your data whatsoever, and the only reason an email is necessary to sign up to comment is to combat spam.
Essentially, Guilty Gamer will do the opposite of what every other site does to annoy you into longer interactions, which is probably the worst idea ever when it comes to creating a sustainable blog. But at the end of the day, the industry has gone down a dark path by chasing money at all costs, resulting in enshittification on a grand scale. This is why we believe that money shouldn’t be the focus to begin with when building a blog, but rather the users.
So if you’d like to read our content, for the foreseeable future, it will be totally free, without any ads or pop-ups, allowing the content to shine, as it should. Everything you read here will be written and edited by a human before it goes live, always keeping ethical (and most importantly, honest) reporting in mind while treating everyone on the project with the respect they deserve.
News will flow, opinions will be aplenty, but unlike many of the mainstream sites out there, you can trust we will do our very best to stay grounded in reality while offering a consistent voice that is tuned to its target audience.
Of course, Guilty Gamer is only just getting off the ground, and like any site, changes should be expected, but that’s the beauty of a blog, and readers are very welcome to offer their input to help steer the site’s direction as it grows, not only through our contact page but also through our comment system you’ll find on every article (there will be no hiding from our words at Guilty Gamer, input is always welcome). And as ridiculous as it sounds, we are in this together, navigating the mess that has been made of the internet.
It’s high time to bring some humanity back to blogging, and perhaps a dash of AI can help keep small projects like this competitive.
