The Future of SEO - Please Chime In

17 years and there's still SEO + PPC in the SERPs.

Where's the change?

That's really funny. Google gives most stuff away for free. Sure, they want
to post ads all over it.

Why would google want you to buy your traffic? If you have a REAL business,
you would be buying "traffic" (read: customers) already via advertising.

So, the only reason why The Super Bowl charges millions per minute for an
ad is....because they want people paying for traffic?

A better way of putting it may be that google would rather people not
spend dollars on idiotic SEO crapola, but rather spend those dollars
wisely. Now that might make sense.

A real business would not rely on gaming the google algo.

I get tons of wikipedia as the first results. And I have yet to see one ad
from wikipedia. But then, I rarely search for "best amazon reviews of
penguin neckties."

Do you have a twin brother lurking around?

Paul

Depends about what do you think about SEO.

If you think that SEO is only an activity of linking here and there, installing plugin here and that, and using any scheme or method which considered as "cheating the system", yeah, that's not for a long term, because it's spamming search engine.

But if you think that SEO is following google guidelines, create a website with a great structure (fast load, no malware, no invalid link, etc), creating some high quality articles which great in visitor-side and can be easily crawled by search engine because it's a related content (with the search terms), promoting your articles or websites through social media and let it go viral... That's a long term SEO, nothing will die.

You would ended up buying traffic if you have done a wrong SEO, that's all.

Well that didn't take long. lol

Paul, maybe you put more eloquently but it's the same thing. Google makes more money when we pay for traffic then when we do SEO crapola as you put it, don't they? As far as gaming the algo goes, I didn't mean spammy shiz...

Rikki, I love your insight. Thank you

I think that kind of talk is relatively paranoid. To start, with these updates, Google isn't targeting the kinds of businesses that would traditionally buy ads from them. They are more or less trying to target low quality sites that game the algorithm to get to the top. I doubt after they sweep or roll out updates that they see any substantial jumps in the amount of advertising purchased. Remember that without solid organic rankings no one is using Google in the first place. A pay-to-play model probably wouldn't return the best results.

I just read that as your "Guru" is using methods that no longer work, and he's trying to sell you Adwords management instead.

If he was a "SEO Guru" he would know that SEO is alive and well, if anything it's even better than before. Google is making fast moves to eliminate all of the monkey magic SEO systems out of the algo, and more power to them. This leaves a much easier path for SEO who actually do know wtf they're doing to get ahead.

The core principles of ranking have not changed one bit in reality. The only SEO methods that have been hit hard are the Poppin-Candy methods that never really worked that well to begin with. I think Googles only problem with them was the massive amount of shitty pages with shitty links they had to generate to rank for a single keyword.

Contextual editorial links embedded on high authority pages is still a winner 17 years on.

The big problem with that statement is that 99.999% of the "SEO" service providers I have come across, do not know what a "Contextual editorial link embedded on a high authority page" is.. And if I showed them what one looked like, they'ed most likely not be able to get one. As there is no module in Senuke for creating them.

They think that means they should pay $5 instead of $2 for their articles to post on their "Tier1 web2.0s"

I think you should fire your 'resident SEO guru'.

First of all, in my opinion, every legitimate business should be buying traffic. Why would you not? Pretty much all of my SEO clients are also running active PPC campaigns. When they get to #1, I tell them not to stop. Own as much of the real estate on page one of Google as you can.

Second, people who say that Google is pushing everyone towards AdWords are complete morons. There are only a finite number of clicks Google can get. If they were to push more people to use AdWords, that does not increase search volume. And pushing people to AdWords only increases what people are bidding if those people are willing to outspend the current AdWords advertisers in their niche. Most are not or they would have been doing that in the first place.

I get so sick of the people whining about their site dropping and complaining that Google wants them to pay for visitors. For every site that drops, others rise. Guess what? Some of those sites that rise are already advertising on AdWords. Their improved organic ranking might actually make them think about cutting back on their AdWords budget. Do you really think Google is going through each search term and making sure that doesn't happen?

This quote though is really why you should fire your SEO. If he does not believe he can get you long term results, then what the hell are you paying him for?


As long as Google is showing ten organic results on page one for search terms, SEO will be around.

The moment Google makes every spot on page one a paid for listing, they will lose credibility and begin to bleed market share to competitors.

Really cool stuff, thanks!! This is exactly what I was wanting.

Like Kevin said there's really not that much that changes in the SERPs. It's still quality links, just like it's always been. Sure new link trends pop up that get hammered by the masses, that's the stuff to avoid. The easier the link is to get, the crappier the link quality is going to be.

I think the confusion comes from people trying to use churn & burn links on long term sites. All links aren't equal.

I think social signals will play a vital role to increase the trust flow of a site.

As long as there is internet there will be SEO or other kind of engine optimisation.
Ofc they want also paid traffic since it is their bread .. from where you think they will get the paper to run that huge thing called Google. CEO needs his millions so do others their multiple thousands.

Aand every empire falls apart, depends only how big the impact will be. If one dissapears another emerges.