September 17, 2013: The SEO industry has been in flux for the past several years and more than a few pundits have have used the word “crisis” to describe the current environment. A succession of anti-spam updates from Google known as Panda and Penguin have forced the industry to retool, regroup, and embark upon a new course.What’s next for SEO? Some conclusions may be deduced from taking a quick look back at SEO’s past.
SEO’s Early Days
In the early 2000s, two broad classes of SEO professional coexisted on the optimization frontier at the same time. The more numerous class was the “White Hat.” White Hats worked hard to advance the organic visibility of their clients’ sites but refused to use tactics expressly prohibited by the search engines. Their less numerous but more colorful counterparts were the “Black Hats” for whom such rules were irrelevant or at least unimportant; Black Hat tactics included link-buying, keyword-stuffing, doorway pages, and other edgy but risky means to obtain SERP visibility.Black Hats often outgunned their White Hat brethren in the battle for SERP dominance, although their victories were often short-lived because Google eventually intervened to nullify any tactics that successfully gamed its algorithms, often attaching a severe judgment penalty on the client for whom the work was done. For example, several years ago a major national retailer had all of its listings removed from Google during the peak Holiday shopping season after when its artificial link building scheme was discovered.
The Great Content Farm Disaster
By 2006, it had become clear to the majority of Web marketers that illicit link-building schemes and other popular Pagerank-oriented Black Hat tactics could catastrophically backfire. Thus the battle lines shifted to “on page” optimization tactics that were arguably more difficult to detect. Obvious illegal on-page techniques such as keyword-stuffing, invisible text, and doorway pages had long been abandoned, so the focus turned to methods — often automated — by which cheap content was produced to stuff search engine SERPs with listings in popular, easily monetized product categories. So-called “content farms” sprang up like kudzu, and in 2011, Google sprang into action again, unleashing Panda on the terabytes of ersatz content that had been produced.But Google didn’t stop there. Its anti-spam algorithm (which is reportedly updated 1.5 times per day) now scours sites for any trace of artificial enhancement or hint of what Google calls “over-optimization.” Today, Google polices its SERPs more methodically than ever, and this new reality has caused some apocalyptically-minded SEO professionals to declare that “SEO is dead.”
The Path Ahead
Today, SEO, far from being dead, has finally disassociated itself from the shady practitioners who had soiled its reputation for years. While some might pine for the “wild west” days of the bygone past, the reality is that the discipline has a strong future ahead of it because of the ongoing need to add value — real value — to web site content by making this content accessible, interesting, and compelling for humans and search engines alike. The result is that there will be a continuing need for people –working in-house or at agencies — to add such value through content creation, categorization, curation, and distribution. This work isn’t sexy, dangerous, or edgy, but it’s necessary work that provides real ROI for marketers, and SEO will an activity that deserves respect – and a proper budget – for the foreseeable future.
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