SEO Isn't Dead, It's Just Changing

The SEO industry is in an interesting place right now. Last year's Panda update to the Google algorithm used logic acquired from human quality testers as the backdrop to a new machine-learning algorithm that could assess the 'quality' of website content in a more sophisticated way. Panda downgraded sites that delivered poor user experience and when it was updated earlier this year, an 'over-optimisation' penalty was deployed. The subsequent 'Penguin' update went further into penalising sites that used so-called 'black-hat' optimisation techniques (keyword-stuffing, duplicated content, 'cloaking', link farms/schemes and so on).

The mission of any search engine is to get the content that is most relevant and useful to your search to the top of the results. The better it can do that the better the user experience. The point about updates such as Panda and Penguin are that they have incorporated new ranking factors that have enabled an assessment of content quality based on a highly scalable application of very human contexts. This is leading some to suggest that SEO as we know it will be 'dead' within two years. The methods deployed to try and 'trick' the algorithm into ranking your content higher are becoming more and more irrelevant.

Perhaps. But there's a whole bunch of legitimate practices around creating well-structured, well-linked-to content with a great user experience that still matter. There can be little doubt that the future of search is going to incorporate increasingly sophisticated re-application of data not just within individual applications but derived from and deployed across many different services in order to provide better contexts to results. Google is already integrating data from Google+ and many other sources (location, device-specific, knowledge graph, Gmail and so on) to create new search experiences (like Search Plus Your World which incorporates content shared by people you are connected to on the web into the results) that are more personalised and more relevant.

So whilst SEO may not be dying, it is certainly changing and changing fast. As the link between so-called 'earned media' and search engine results gets stronger and as the data sources that form results become more numerous and more complex, the requirement is increasingly for SEO to be integrated into everything that the brand does. That means not only the quality of your content, but how you produce it and what you do with it. The skills of a good SEO person have always been about increasing visibility of content and getting it in front of people who are prospective buyers/customers/consumers. And that skill will surely be in more demand than ever.

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Comments

[Dan Thornton]

A pretty accurate and non-sensationalist article about SEO? Nice work, Sir, and totally agree

[Tim]

Sounds awfully familiar . Whilst the technical input to SEO has it's own knowledge base and experience the end results, "getting it [visibilty &content ] in front of people who are prospective buyers/customers/consumers" underlies much of what other business managers seek to achieve too.

[Steven]

As you say:

"The mission of any search engine is to get the content that is most relevant and useful to your search to the top of the results."

This is what I tell my clients. Make your content the most useful and relevant content for the search terms you are targeting.

[Steve]

I like that image of "old-school" version of Google. Good article, too; it's definitely good news for legitimate content creators and content finders alike.

[Darcy Kammerer]

Although recent search engine policies have affected the SEO industry considerably, we can hope for a better user experience as we go forward. At this point, all we can do is hope and believe that the search engines are gearing their algorithms towards filtering the great content and penalizing those that are just using black-hat tactics to rise up the rankings. SEOs should take this as a challenge to create better content and deliver a better user experience in the future.

[Nick Stamoulis]

SEO is about much more than adding keywords to your website. It's important to consistently create content that end users (humans) will actually appreciate. In addition, it's necessary to get that content shared in social media. An SEO strategy that isn't integrated into a content marketing and social strategy won't get you very far.

[Staci Burruel]

It could be said that SEO is able to adapt to the ever-changing ways and needs of society. As they say, the only thing that’s constant is change. So as time goes on, new discoveries are made. What is essential for these things is that, it should still be to better, and to formulate more efficient ways of doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO).