Your website, your authority: why SEO is more honest than the Instagram algorithm

Instagram is useful, and we use it

Instagram is a very good shop window for a place or a piece of work: a hotel, a dish, a painting, a new song. We recommend it to our clients and we use it ourselves.

What we're not convinced by is using it to sell a person as the product. We have nothing against people who make a living that way, but we'd rather show the place, the work, the art. And the problem isn't the window: it's that someone else decides whether your window shows up.

What the algorithm rewards

Instagram explains that it ranks what you see with predictions: how likely you are to comment, like, share, tap the profile or keep watching. It doesn't measure whether something is true or useful. It measures whether it gets a reaction.

And what gets the strongest reaction isn't always the best. A study published in PNAS in 2021 analysed 2.7 million posts and found that each word about the opposing group raised the odds of a post being shared by 67%. Anger travels better than information.

For a business that has a concrete consequence: reaching your own audience depends on a system you don't control, that changes without notice and isn't designed for you.

That's why so many hotels, artists and shops end up dancing to a trend or making a video that has nothing to do with what they offer, just so the algorithm shows them. That effort goes into pleasing the system, not into convincing the customer.

An example close to home: the 2026 World Cup

We use this case because we lived it up close and it shows clearly how an algorithm works. It isn't a political stance: racism exists in every country, ours included.

During the World Cup, FIFA analysed more than 17.1 million posts and comments on X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Argentina was the most targeted team of the tournament, and within a few weeks the idea took hold that Argentina is “the most racist country in the world”.

The data doesn't say that. In the Integrated Values Survey (2017-2022), 2.7% of Argentines would mind having a neighbour of another race. The world average is 17%, Western Europe's 7% and Latin America's 9%. There were racist incidents during the tournament, and it's right that they were reported, but the label was false.

Social media didn't correct it: it multiplied it. A video made people angry, the anger brought comments and shares, and the system read that as interest and showed it to more people. The algorithm doesn't care whether something is true, it cares what it provokes. The problem wasn't a country: it was the system that decides what we see.

How the internet was, and how it can be again

Before social media, every site was its own authority. Its owner ran it, it had its own address, and its reputation grew slowly: from what it published, from who recommended it, from how long it had been around.

Your own website still works that way. It's your address, your rules and your direct contact with customers: email, WhatsApp, the booking. Nobody decides whether you're shown today. And what you build doesn't vanish when the algorithm of the moment changes.

Google charges too, but it says so

Not everything online is free. On Google you can pay to appear first, and that result is labelled as sponsored. Google says it gives no ranking advantage for commercial relationships, advertising included.

The rest of the page, the organic results, can't be bought. They're earned with SEO. That's where we work.

Why SEO is more honest

Google asks for helpful, reliable content written for people, showing experience, expertise, authority and trust. Put simply: what you say should match who you are and what the person was looking for.

It isn't a perfect system and someone is always trying to cheat. But over time a page that informs and helps rises, and one that exaggerates or promises what it doesn't have falls. The more real your content is, the better you do.

The difference is in the question each system asks. A social media algorithm asks whether something gets a reaction. A search engine asks whether it answers what you searched for. For a hotel, a gallery or a musician, the second question is far fairer.

What we do at Andes Developers

We're a web design and SEO studio in El Chaltén, Argentina. We work for hotels, artists and businesses across Patagonia, from El Calafate to Bariloche and the Chilean side, and for clients in other parts of the world.

That's why we don't just sell a website. We sell an idea: that your brand has its own place on the internet, with its own authority, where customers find you because they're looking for you and write to you directly. Instagram as the shop window, Booking as a complement, and the website as your home.