End of SEO, ranking, PageRank, the world?

Web site Statistics

Ami Isseroff

November 23, 2008

You can see it everywhere. Like the old song,

"You can read it in the morning paper,

you can hear it on the rahdee--oh,

We need a whole lot more of Organic Search,

and a lot less SEO

We need a nationwide revival,

To put the love of Cutts in our Soul

we need a whole lot more of Organic Search,

and a lot less SEO."

A lot of people are singing that tune.

Folks are predicting that the latest search engine technologies are going to make SEO obsolete. Check Google for "End of SEO" "End of Ranking" and you'll see what it's all about.

Is the end of the world nigh? These people are pretty convincing, except that the first articles about this appeared around 2005, and neither SEO nor Google PageRank have disappeared. It is getting to be an old SEO Superstition. See: Google Pagerank is no longer important.

People have been predicting the end of the world as we know it for a long time.

The basic idea of most of many of these claims is that innovations like Google Onebox, Personalized Search and SearchWiki threaten to change the way pages are indexed. Supposedly, it will be based on personal preferences, and other factors, like whether or not you have video on your Website etc. Can you get rid of your SEO firm ask the doomsayers? Some say not. You will need an SEO expert more than ever to advise you about content, about analytics and tracking and whatnot.

Is the end of the world nigh? I don't think so. Google PageRank and use of inbound links and Anchor Text and content to determine rank order in search results have a number of known faults, but thus far nobody has a better system. There are good SEO companies and schlock ones. Schlock SEO people don't like Pagerank and similar organic SEO. Why? Because they make it hard to beat the system and give customers SERP rank #1 for keyword "Sex" in one week as they promised in their ads, especially if the customer has a website with only 10 Web pages with 50 words on each one, all copied from somewhere else.

The whole point of all the different Search Engine algorithms is to find quality sites that are relevant to the search. To get to the top of rankings for a Keyword and to get high PageRank you need to have:

Original content that is relevant to the search phrase.

Backlinks - Content that is good enough so that people link to it, and specific enough so that they will use the keyword or phrase in the anchor text of the link.

An established website that has been around for quite a few years.

A lot of web pages with original content.

All of the above will get help get your pages to the top of any search. Of course, proper Website SEO design, Off Page Optimization, On Page Optimization and Off Site Optimization

are all necessary, but they are not sufficient. They are not a substitute for having a lot of good content that has gotten a good reputation and numerous real unpaid links.

All of the above are very hard to do if you are an SEO firm that promised a customer with a new and mediocre website "top rank" for a popular keyword. But a person has got to make a living right? So some SEO people try to convince customers that Pagerank and links don't matter, and that they should be increasing their "conversion ratio" rather than getting more visitors, or that really, they don't want all those visitors who might be looking for the popular single word search term. They should, according to some SEO wisdom, concentrate on "Long tail search." But the point about long tail search is that you can't optimize for it. Long tail search consists of the huge body of combinations of words that each produce one or two searches a month or a year, but together add up to many visitors - you can't have a Web page that has all those terms. Of course, if you have a page with a high PageRank, it will get traffic from long tail searches if it happens to have those phrases or rare words.

The down side of ranking by PageRank and other measures of Website Authority is that they require time. An older, larger site has more authority than a brand new one for the same topic. It has to. That gets rid of a lot of chaff, but it also keeps out a lot of wheat. Let's say you have just written the absolutely best page about wheat. Guess what, Wikipedia has the #1 page for wheat in Google results, as you might expect. Your page is much better, has more information, better information and more links. But you have only 10 pages on your brand new website. How many years will it take before you get to the top of the Google results for wheat? That's tough, isn't it? That is bad for search users as well as people with Web pages. It means that the freshest information about a changing, newsworthy topic is often buried on page 5 of the search engine results. Let's say there was Internet and Google 100 years ago or so. Everyone believed in something called the luminiferous ether which pervaded space and carried light. At about that time, an obscure patent clerk named Albert Einstein advanced the idea that it might not be so. How long would it have taken a Web page with Einstein's idea to get to be #1 for keyword search Ether? Einstein's ideas were buried in relatively obscure journals for many years, and some of the best ideas today may be buried in obscure Web pages as well. Personalized search and SearchWiki, used correctly, might help fix the problem and popularize obscure pages that deserve attention.

Google's new SearchWiki is very similar to a different search engine - Search Wikia which might just be where the idea came from. There, you can add, edit and comment on search results and your opinions are evidently propagated instantly (more or less) to all users.

Here is why I think SearchWiki and personalized search are not going to end the importance of PageRank, optimization and the like, though they may introduce some more factors to make life interesting.

There are two sorts of personalized search, active and passive. Active personalized search is represented by SearchWiki and similar ideas - the user tells the system what they want. Passive personalized search is exemplified in Google's use of your personal search data to determine what results to show you. Both types can also contribute data to be used by search engines in rankings that are made public to everyone, an extension of the Link popularity idea or similar to the old Zeal Web directory.

Passive search personalization has been going on for a few years. If it is done right, it should not eliminate the need to optimizing your Web page, and it should not harm you. For example, localization can be used to resolve ambiguity and give people better search results that suit their intentions. A person in the UK searching for "boot" might want information about storage space in an automobile, while in the US "boot" is something you wear. The remaining sites about footwear that are presented to USA users are STILL sorted according to pagerank, authority and content relevance. If your listing was number 1 for "boot" in the US before, it will still be number 1 in the US. In the UK, you will lose your top place perhaps and some visitors, but "they were lousy visitors anyhow." If you are selling footwear, you really don't need all those UK visitors who want to read about the rear storage space of an automobile, and probably they don't want to buy your boots, which are being sold in San Francisco.

In active personalization like SearchWiki, users determine the popular pages either for themselves or for everyone based on different criteria than those used by SEO. However, the basic premise of SEO is that most users only look at the first 10 search results, and generally only click on the top result. If so, all the personalization optimization done by users is going to be done on the top 10 pages. Yes it will have an effect, and yes it can be subject to abuse, but if it is not useful and produces junk, it is doubtful if SearchWiki and similar ideas will be continued. There might be a very good reason why the Zeal directory, where users rated websites, was discontinued.

The end of SEO is prophecied often, just as the end of the world is predicted every Sunday by some people. It probably won't happen soon. It has to happen eventually. In a hundred years, people may search a world neural Web just by thinking about a term. After all, Search Engines didn't exist 20 years ago, so they might not exist in 20 years. That's tech biz.

However, economics might put a damper on things for a while. Clients with no money are not going to be eager to spend it on SEO.

Come to think of it, there's a Carter Family song that might suit the occasion:

For fear the hearts of men are failing,

For these are latter days we know;

The Great Depression now is spreading,

God's word declared, it would be so.

If God said so, He must know, right?

Ami Isseroff