Could This Be the End of SEO As We Know It?

[Mike Williams]

Thankfully I have not yet been a victim of this but I've noticed a several people complaining that their site has been dropped and even deindexed from Google recently.

Apparently there have been rumors floating around that Google wanted to start tracking user behavior and with Google Chrome that's now possible.

Could this be the end of content that's just "fodder" for the SEs?
Could this be the end of sales letter homepages ranking well for anything?
Do you think this is really happening?
How will you adjust if it does?

[Andrew Maule]

One way or another stuff like this will happen regarding the way SEs spider, so we'll have to cross that bridge when it actually comes.

[Jason Fladlien]

Why are you releasing just "fodder" for the search engines anyway? With the right systems it's just as easy to release content that's both human-friendly and search engine-friendly. Why are people so intent on "tricking the system"?

I believe it has something to do with human nature, and the tendency to cheat.

-Jason

[Jared Alberghini]

The sky is falling!!! The sky is falling!!!

In all seriousness, SEO will never die unless search engines die, or are overtaken by a more powerful technology... which I don't see happening for a looong time... unless AI takes over sooner than we think

To simplify the definition of SEO itself... as long as you have good unique content, that has some decent backlinks that are relevent to your unique content, and most importantly, add new good content regularly...

Don't be suckered in to putting up a bunch of 'content site templates' that have the same content as everyone else and expect to rate well with the se's...

Be original, offer some value, and you will succeed.

- Jared

[John Hocking]

Originally Posted by webdesignhq

Be original, offer some value, and you will succeed.

- Jared

Eactly! Don't run after every trend or try to game the system with
the latest automated script.

Build a well organized (tightly themed) site with orginal content.
Make your urls and sub folders spider friendly.

Create a Google sitemap submit to Google.

Create a user sitemap and link to it from every page. When a page is indexed the sitemap will let the spider explore the rest of your site.

Publish articles to the article directories with links back to your site.

Create a blog and subit it to all the blog search engines.
This list will help
RSSTop55 - Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites - Robin Good' Sharewood Tidings

Google did shake things up recently but all most site took a drastic rise in ranking. Most are in the top 5 and several top 1.

If you keep your content orginal and tighly themed, you will evently rank well for the theme.

[maestero2010]

SEO can never be ended........google is now concerning much more now on their user behaviour as what google toolbar does to get a site pagerank. ...so now they would be more concentrating on PS rather than ranking.......might be .........

[theinsider12]

Google has been doing a lot of "weeding out" of some things lately (according to some inside sources)

Could be bad for some, but good for those that are left over to take all the the rankings over!!



-K

[Bruce Hearder]

Hi all,

I honestly believe that way too many people believe that the search engines are way more intelligent than they really are..

Remember, the search engines are nothing more than a complicated computer algorithm (forumula).

This algorithm simply ranks websites based on a number of variables, some variable have more weighting than others.

The serach engines, and especially Google have spent millions (if not billions) on their algorithm, and if they now have to start ranking websites based on
what users want to see, and or user voting (like in Social Bookmarking sites) this will have to be viewed as an amazing admission that their algorithm has failed, and that BigG has lost the battle against the "dark side of the force".

I seriously doubt this to be happen any time soon! If Ever!

Many of the statements made by the search engines are simply "red herrings" thrown out to the masses to devour without questioning..

They can claim they are going to crack down on a certain aspect of SEO, so they make a statement about it, and within days a huge percentage of the
ill-informed masses are running around like "chickens with their heads cut off" and stop using that technique.

That was easy for the Search engines.. They didn't have to do anytghing.. Just spread a bit of misinformation, and let mass hysteria do the rest.

Sometime its take a bit of common sense to see things are not exactly as the masses make out..

Rant now finished ..

Take care

Bruce

[Jon Alexander]

the software to 'spin' (or 'wrangle' as it's actually called) existing content into something new and unique actually already exists. So bring it on, Google!

[MarQueteer]

Originally Posted by Mike Williams

Thankfully I have not yet been a victim of this but I've noticed a several people complaining that their site has been dropped and even deindexed from Google recently.

Apparently there have been rumors floating around that Google wanted to start tracking user behavior and with Google Chrome that's now possible.

Could this be the end of content that's just "fodder" for the SEs?
Could this be the end of sales letter homepages ranking well for anything?
Do you think this is really happening?
How will you adjust if it does?

Certainly a long term scenario that could become true one day, but I doubt it's the reason why many people got delisted. Google simply becomes better at detecting link spam and spam pages in general, without any data from Chrome. The remedy is easy: Quality content, not just unique, content that has real value for visitors.

[ahefner33]

I think the simple answer or logic is that nobody knows. Sure you can talk about theory's but until it happens..........you just don't know, unless you own Google :P

[abibakar]

SEO would never die as long as people still use Google, Yahoo and MSN.

[CTABUK]

Google is about to change the whole system, it's called Google Universal - it will be based on searches made, more localised sites to your known geographical location will feature in the results. So if you are searching for let's say Green Widgets then the first result will be the nearest distributor to where you are searching from. It will also place more emphasis on those sites with Google video/ you tube video links. So use video site maps.

[netstrife]

Originally Posted by Bruce Hearder

Hi all,

I honestly believe that way too many people believe that the search engines are way more intelligent than they really are..

Remember, the search engines are nothing more than a complicated computer algorithm (forumula).

This algorithm simply ranks websites based on a number of variables, some variable have more weighting than others.

The serach engines, and especially Google have spent millions (if not billions) on their algorithm, and if they now have to start ranking websites based on
what users want to see, and or user voting (like in Social Bookmarking sites) this will have to be viewed as an amazing admission that their algorithm has failed, and that BigG has lost the battle against the "dark side of the force".

I seriously doubt this to be happen any time soon! If Ever!

Many of the statements made by the search engines are simply "red herrings" thrown out to the masses to devour without questioning..

They can claim they are going to crack down on a certain aspect of SEO, so they make a statement about it, and within days a huge percentage of the
ill-informed masses are running around like "chickens with their heads cut off" and stop using that technique.

That was easy for the Search engines.. They didn't have to do anytghing.. Just spread a bit of misinformation, and let mass hysteria do the rest.

Sometime its take a bit of common sense to see things are not exactly as the masses make out..

Rant now finished ..

Take care

Bruce

Agree completely. I make my living pretty much entirely off SEO and the fundamentals (backlinks + content) simply don't change.. google still uses their algorithm to rank sites like they always did. There is simply no viable way to incorporate social voting well since it's way too easy to cheat.

[spudzz]

Entirely agree Bruce. If anything, my own sites seem to be ranking on even simpler assessments than before - backlinks, title tags etc.

It's about time sites were assessed on things like bounce rate etc. but as that's not currently in Google's interest (they just LOVE high bounce rates provided the exit is an Adsense ad) I'm not holding my breath. Site 'quality' is much more difficult to assess automatically than site relevance (which is just looking at text) so don't expect anything dramatic anytime soon.

Google does a very good job of what it does, but what it does is pretty feeble actually. Having said that, it's still streets ahead of the other search engines. Someday, someone's going to do some really cool coding and produce a search engine that'll blow everything else out of the water but that will need investment so don't expect anything over the next couple of years. Until then, good ol' SEO still rules.

[Steve Crooks]

The holy grail for google has to be that users are ultimately satisfied with the results they see in google's rankings. If the technology exists to actually see how happy user's are with the end experience of the sites they end up up on from doing a search, would google use that technology? You bet your bottom dollar they would.

We are probably not close to that becoming a reality just yet, but it will happen. For now, on site and off site optimization is still important ranking factors but this will dissipate over time I believe.

Rather than build our sites with SEO in mind, we should concentrate on user optimization. If we build sites for people to enjoy and get something of interest to them from, then we will literally make our future in this business a whole lot easier.

[krishananda]

Oh I only wish there is a legit organization that rules SEO things, the one that could sum up everything from google, yahoo, ask, msn, etc,

Kinda like IEEE or something, so we don't have to guess any slight changes in search engines' algorithm.

Or am I talking about SEMPO here? nah, I don't think so, join a membership with the lowest price of $299 annually is just too much. Especially when it claims to be a global non-profit organization.

[AllproJJ]

Originally Posted by Jason Fladlien

Why are you releasing just "fodder" for the search engines anyway? With the right systems it's just as easy to release content that's both human-friendly and search engine-friendly. Why are people so intent on "tricking the system"?

I believe it has something to do with human nature, and the tendency to cheat.

-Jason

I totally agree, 100%