There is a feeling you get when a film you have been waiting for is finally about to start. That is what it felt like to open a new Bill Slawski post.
I never met him in person. But I sent him questions, shyly, and he always replied. Always. That kind of generosity is rarer than it sounds, especially from someone who had every reason to be protective of his time. I appreciated it more than I ever got around to telling him.
I found SEO by the Sea at my first SEO agency in London. I had come to SEO through the long way round — optimising my own small online business, reading a book, getting the role. When someone there pointed me toward Bill's work, I went back to 2005 and read everything. I spent weeks on the patent analysis alone, going through post after post trying to understand every piece of it. I was not skimming. I was studying.
Bill covered Google patents. Not summarised them. Not skimmed them for a LinkedIn post. Covered them — properly, thoroughly, in the way you do when you actually understand what you are reading and respect the person you are writing for. He would take a patent filing written for engineers and lawyers and work through it until it meant something. Until it told you how Google was actually thinking. Not the Google of blog posts and spokesperson quotes. The Google that had been quietly building a system since the late nineties with a very specific idea of what understanding language, authority, and intent should look like.
Nobody does what he did. That gap is still there.
Years later, I still catch myself quoting him in meetings. Not performing it, not referencing it deliberately — just reaching for the right way to explain something and realising the framing came from him. That is what an invisible mentor looks like.
In 2022 I took a six-month sabbatical from SEO. Burnout — the kind where you unsubscribe from everything, block anything work-related, and spend your time gardening instead. I needed all of it.
Eventually, the sabbatical ran its course. Coffee on the balcony. Six months of the internet to catch up on.
That is when I saw it. The post about Bill Slawski's death. I knew he had been ill. I still didn't expect it.
I had been away when it happened. I had missed the tributes, the community's reaction, all of it. Sitting on that balcony with my coffee, I found out on my own, days late. And I felt it — that specific sadness of losing someone whose work mattered to you, even if you only ever knew each other through a screen. It felt like something had ended. Like a big chapter, a whole era of how this industry thought about itself, had quietly closed while I was gone.
A lot of people who were shaped by his work never got to say thank you. This is me, a bit late, saying it anyway.
If you are newer to SEO and haven't read SEO by the Sea: the archive is still there. Start anywhere. Read it more than once.
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