The Dday of SEO rat-race...

I don't know when it will come, but most likely it will come slowly. SEO techniques come SEO techniques go. Google will change the algorithm, but it will always be an algo (in the foreseeable future). So as long as there's a way to make money in SEO entrepreneurs will continue to decipher the algorithm!!! Thank you entrepreneurs!

That's a scary thought! A lot of gurus would be out of jobs...but I guess that's the nice thing about SEO, when one method no longer works it will be replaced with another one. It keeps everyone on their toes and in a way makes it a bit more interesting compared to other industries.

But even if Google is at the top there are other search engines out there that people still use. Bing is one that comes to mind (although personally I never use it.) Bing is doing everything to match Google - maybe they'll succeed maybe they won't. But when Google came into the picture several years ago (yes people...there was a time when Google did not rule the www) there were other more established search engines and nobody really thought Google could compete with them.

Although I think it will take a long time before SEs completely do away with using links with their algo. Maybe they'll just wise up and find a way to detect paid links easily.

I really don't think that G's algo depends a lot on backlinking. I'm seeing if you add more pages that are properly optimized - G rewards you.

Doesn't matter what algorithm they changed to, it will be figured out and appropriate adjustments will be executed =) Would that waste all of the link building you did before, yes and no. You may have to start executing a new plan to work back up, or stay up, but you got traffic and sales during the time you were ranked for the old algorithm. Life is full of changes and you either adjust or wither away, simple as that; same concept applies.

If you're in the SEO biz, it's your job to stay up-to-date and keep up with the changes so that you can adjust accordingly; and that's in any marketing job.

One thing that will remain constant will be their focus on quality content. So as long as we are focusing on quality content, we should be fine even if the algorithms change (it might just be a slight dip in the rankings).

Yeah, I totally agree with providing quality content. If you provide real solid content,people will eventually spread the words around, even though your site isn't rank number 1.

Do you think Google's algo can measure quality? I don't. It measures quality by looking at backlinks and figures links mean a page is of a certain standard. It certainly can't measure quality by parsing the page alone.

Anyway, how do you define quality? It means different things to different people. I know people who think you can buy a quality guitar for 200 bucks

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Well Google and other search engines are bound by what is measurable by a computer system, things like quality are impossible to measure without human interaction....the web is way too big for that.

Your point, at it's core, I think is a good one though. We all need to be creating quality content and finding ways to drive direct traffic and sales through things like email lists and FB.

There's no way for search engine to monitor the quality at the moment. I'm pretty sure Google will do something to improve how a website being rank. Who knows...Probably some genius would come up with a brilliant idea to monitor the quality one day.

IF backlinks is the only way to monitor the quality, I guess many internet users like us will be very disappointed as backlinks can be manipulated easily.

Hopefully somebody will come up with a whole new system to measure quality so that we as the users can get the best out of it.

I dont think that anything of such sort will happen overnight. Yes Google is making some changes to its algorithm every now and then, but then too we can still have enough time to adjust with the new changes and change our SEO strategies also accordingly.