SEO is Dead
OK, that sounds a bit over the top for a site with SEO in its name so I’ll clarify. I did not mean Search Engine Optimization, as we know it, is dead. Nor did I mean to say that SEO has become Search Engine Marketing, Online Marketing or anything else. No, what I meant was, SEO is finished, kaput, sleeping with the fishes, in a word, DEAD!
I came to the realization while preparing for my 2000th post in our forum. As a person who has never considered himself an SEO, I began to wonder how I managed to reach this milestone. Certainly many of my posts qualify as off topic or mindless drivel. Nevertheless, buried in the slag heap there have been a few gems. And some of those gems have been valuable to our members as they pursue SE… umm, whatever it is they do.
And, that’s my point. Nobody here does SEO.
What we do is run forums and businesses, promote products and services, and provide information and entertainment. Few of us actually have SEO in our job titles (and those who do are constantly explaining to potential clients that Search Engine Optimization really isn’t Search Engine Optimization anymore). Calling ourselves SEOs is a bit like referring to truckers as teamsters in spite of the fact that they’ve never seen a mule team.
So, What Killed SEO?
I almost believe it was top ten lists. That, instead of optimizing our sites, we were searching for that elusive tenth item to complete a blog post that should have ended with seven. Nevertheless, I find the format irresistible, so here’s my list of the Ten Things that Killed SEO:
- Google is the only game in town and it’s broken: Does anyone really “optimize†for anyone else? Even spammers don’t bother promising number one rankings on MSN and Yahoo. As the dominant search engine, Google has become increasingly quirky, making optimization increasingly difficult and decreasingly rewarding in relation to competing methods of online marketing.
- There are other towns: Google may be the only game in search but increasingly people are moving to MySpace, Digg and other online communities for their information needs. Indeed social network marketing, not search, is the focus of most “SEO†buzz these days.
- AdSense and AdWords: Google successfully leveraged its search technology into the AdSense/AdWords cash cow and in the process spawned millions of MFA (made for AdSense) pages that clutter up our search results and inspire us to look elsewhere.
- Clutter: Once upon a time Google was about search results. Now it’s about ads, maps, stock charts and more. I’m sure our friends at SEOchat worked hard to rank highly for the term “SEO.†Too bad their listing now falls behind:
- Three ads (and along side eight additional ads)
- A stock listing for STORA ENSO OYJ
- Two Wikipedia entries
- Search is fracturing: Google now offers web search, image search, video search, news search, local search, “more†search and “even more†search. Do you optimize for one, a few or all types of search? How can you optimize if, as may already be happening, satisfying the demands of one algorithm causes another to punish you.
- Search is old news: Whether or not the legendary sandbox exists, achieving high search rankings is a long-term proposition. In a dynamic world driven by change and innovation, search results are yesterday’s news. That’s great if you want to know how many trips Columbus made to the New World (4) but less than helpful when your world is changing daily.
- Social networks: I’ve mentioned social networks before but they have an additional advantage over search engines. If search is about “old†news, social networks such as Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and – on a small scale – forums like this one are about what’s happening now. They allow users to bypass Google by recruiting an army of like-minded people to do their searching for them. In the process they offer members the possibility of reaching an audience of tens of thousands almost immediately.
- New technologies defy search: Flash and Ajax pages contain data that cannot easily be parsed by a search algorithm. You can’t optimize what Google can’t understand.
- Link baiting/building isn’t about search: A bit of common sense here: link baiting is popular because – when done well – it works, it works quickly, and its effects linger. If one of those lingering effects is improved Google rankings (it’s not guaranteed) then so much the better. But improving your rankings is a side effect of link baiting/building not the reason for it.
- The “rules†of SEO aren’t about search engines anymore (if they ever were): Consider a few “rules:â€
- Use keywords in your title
- One major headline <h1> using your keywords per page
- Lists and “how-to†articles are popular
- Create compelling content
- Provide fresh content regularly
Which of those rules won’t apply if Google disappears tomorrow? How are they different from what you would tell an aspiring (offline) newspaper reporter? SEO rules are mostly common sense. Unfortunately, common sense isn’t easy to program into an algorithm, not even for Google.
Then Why Are We Here?
What we have in common is not SEO but the fact that we live large portions of our lives online building websites, communities and businesses. We’d like to be better at it and we’d like more people to discover what we’ve created. So we’re here asking questions about design, coding, servers, business, installing blogs, managing forums, writing haiku, and – occasionally – Google.
We could call ourselves “unstable people hanging out on a – relatively – stable server†but SEO Refugees is catchier and more to the point. We have, after all, escaped the mindset that our success is dictated by Google’s results and landed on an island that celebrates what we achieve, whether it’s a pastor’s blog, a Vista forum or just a bunch of random crap online.
There is definitely a lot of food for thought there. Your point about search only being good for old news, like history, is very accurate. Social sites are the future. Google rankings are a biproduct of other types of effective marketing.
Search engines have been social sites ever since they started paying attention to links from other sites. Linking is a social activity, as is the choice of link text to go with that link.
I have SEO in the domain name of my blog, and it the name of my business. At some point, I may start claiming that SEO stands for “Social Engine Optimization.”
SEO strictly speaking is web site development with the goal of getting indexed and ranking well in the search results generated by an algorithm. It is sort of like painting your cattle orange during the hunting season. And there are algorithms doing ranking and scoring all over the place, even at social media sites. As long as there is a benefit understanding and adapting to various algoritms then SEO will be very much alive.
According to a Google engineer I have talked to they are working on better indexing unindexable content, you better expect alot from Google in the future.
And search is not old news, people search more than ever. Search is getter ever more important, and hopefully better with the move towards more personalized results. Some time in the future in the age of “Web 3.0” we might even have personal agents doing searching for us.
Get your site ranked #1 on the engines for an active phrase or phrases and see how much it means.
Social networks are also great…but don’t stop doing seo.
Dave
Great post Pops. Not that I agree… but I wouldn’t exactly disagree either. I’ve always held SEO is a school of thought and is part of the larger marketing world.
But is it dead?
Nah!
And link bait is all about SE rankings. The social sites send tons on nonconverting traffic but the links you pick up lead to the rankings that lead the interested prospect to your site to purchase your (product, service, whatever).
SEO evolves but the principles remain the same – rank well for convertable traffic. The tactics change but the goal remains the same.
Before social media was reciprovcal linking. Before that, paid sitewide links. Before our time was keyword stuffing and keyword ratios. Before that was meta tag stuffing.
Anyway, good post. It’s a thinker.
Just FYI, the optimization part of SEO has been dead :) Optimization or not, you can rank well.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to rank number one in Google for a key term. I just think the focus of what you’re all doing has moved well past focusing on Google and just web search.
To me the profession formerly know as SEO no longer revolves around Google. And, while the news that SERPs are shifting, elicits joy from a few and tears from a few more, the majority of the community gives a collective yawn and goes back to reading their RSS feeds.
I’m honored to be the first example link in the article. Thank you. :)
Your article is thoroughly considered and brilliantly composed. It analyzes the specific activities of those involved and provides worthwhile insight into the precision of the tasks. This article is an example of both SEO and non-SEO design. It uses a link-bait style title, provides quality content, and advances a new perspective in a fairly new field.
Very well done!
to be honest i would be happy ranking in google for any term.
i suppose i could make up one of those random nonsense keywords so that i could rank number 1 for just one thing but it just wouldnt be the same as having number 1 spot for say microsoft or ebay :-)
SEO is not dead, it is just changing like it always has been since 1995.
Its really a very good post. Deep study of Seo. I m agree with you. Today peoples are preffering social networking sites for their need. But its just a trend. Search engine is forever. After some time all social networking sites will be known as Spam full sites. That’s what my mind say.
I first started reading, kept reading, waiting for a punch line. First, I do think social networking will be here a while and it will grow but so will the search. The internet populace is growing everyday – most people haven’t even heard of social networking but dang near everyone knows Google. For the competitive search terms the sites on the first page (at least) have implimented sound SEO practices – they only remain at the top by keeping up with algo changes and tweeks in application made by those who figured things out (the best anyone can) and decided to share the info. I think what is dead is the website design only companies – they better get a hold of sound SEO principles. Amazing how many don’t even know what the h tag is…
Why not come out and say Google is dead? For lots of reasons I like the sound of that.
Who came up with the term SEO anyways? We aren’t optimizing search engines. If anything it should be called Rank Manipulation because really that’s all SEO is about.
Fundamentally SEO is about targeted traffic. Targeted traffic brings sales and profits. Call it what you want,, seo, sem, smo… it’s all the same stuff.
^
I completely agree. More appropriate than “SEO is dead” is “Google is Dead”. SEO is basically meant for PR jumps (for most of us). as Jeff says…it’s rather Search Engine Manipulation