Google, SEO, and the Ruination of the Internet

That's right. Ruination.

I happened across a recent blog post that condemns the increased frequency with which online marketing experts are recommending the use of social media sites as a means to influence search engine results. The thinking goes that hordes of SEO-types are infiltrating the social web seeking to leverage the platform to generate back-links to their maybe-sometimes-but-not-that-often relevant content.

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it's not just the social media sites that are at risk. The situation described above is merely a symptom of a much larger issue. The real problem stems from Relevancy, how it's computed by the search engines, and the SEO industry it has spawned.

(as an aside, any term that can be used freely as a noun, verb, and adjective in the same sentance has to be suspect. I'm an SEO performing SEO so my client's site will be SEO).

What am I talking about, you say? Here's the crux of it - "Relevancy" is a subjective concept that the search engines are attempting to determine by objective means. You cannot determine a qualitative measure by using a purely quantitative analysis.

And so what's happened is this. With the exception of the farthest reaches of the long-tail, adding your target keywords (or phrases) to your Title and Meta Tags and on page copy and then throwing in some H1s and BOLD tags for good measure cannot enable the search engines to determine the most relevant page for any search term given the fact that there are likely hundreds of other sites out there that have done the same thing for the same search terms. So what we're left with, then, is Page Rank.

By now, the Google Page Rank Algorithm is widely known. Simply put, the more back-links you have, preferably from high-ranking pages, the higher your own page rank will be. In an environment that is as content-rich and comptetive as, well, the entire internet, simply publishing a piece of content and hoping it gets noticed and hoping further that the good-folks of the web will graciously bestow upon your content bundles of back-links is wishful thinking indeed.

In a more traditional marketing model, a product is produced and then marketed. Clever or Sexy or Serious advertisements are created and distributed through various media. Much of which is online these days - "banner" advertising is far from dead, especially as broadband penetration deepens and rich media ads become more pervasive. Historically, (pre-internet), TV and Radio and Print were the primary distribution vehicles, but the effectiveness of these was (is) hard to measure. With internet-based advertising eveything became trackable and the numbers were appalling (1% Click-Thru rates!).

Google revolutionized internet advertising through contextualized CPC ads. Suddenly advertisers were given control over when their ad was shown and could determine how much they were willing to pay for the acquisition of that online visitor. Highly measurable, ROI could easily be determined and in many cases even an arbitrage was created.

And then everybody looked to their left a little. And what they saw were the natural search results, just sitting there, promising free traffic. No CPC, if only my site was on the front page....

Thus was SEO born.

And so what happens? In an attempt to overcome the fact that 1000 other websites are using the same keywords in Title and Meta tags, etc., the diligent SEO goes on a link building campaign. The objective search engine bot spiders and picks up links mostly indiscriminently, and the hard-working SEO knows this, so just about any link is a good link (and, man, those social media sites sure are great places to build links).

If you follow this closely enough, SEO really becomes a game of trying to convince (fool) the search engines that your content is more "relevant" than somebody else's.

If I hire 1000 people in the Ukraine to spam the social media sites, does that make me more relevant? If I succumb to the daily phone calls from the company that wants me to pay bloggers to write about my content and provide back-links, does that make me more relevant? Or what if I simply buy Text Link ads? Maybe these are considered "black hat," but they're only taking a perfectly acceptable SEO practice to it's logical extreme.

And it happens every day.

I'll admit that "Ruination" is a strong word. But the current notion of relevancy is broken and an entire industry has sprung up to take advantage of the situation.

Comments

[Tad Chef]

Do you really believe this? I think it's rather a link bait SEO trick to lure the usual suspect SEO hater types to your blog and to get links for it.
Make your blog less ugly, more relevant and stop spreding lies then people might link to it. Also stop spamming Mixx with your hate propaganda.

[Tin Pig]

Tad - My post isn't about SEO Hate, though it's curious that you're so defensive.

Anyway, the gist of the post is how the relevancy algorithm is badly flawed, and that flaw has created an industry of practitioners and tactics ("link-bait" - it even sounds deceitful) that attempt to expliot that flaw.

I don't bear any grudge against the people who call themselves an SEO or do SEO. I'm just writing my opinion and would actually welcome an intelligent discussion on the subject.

[peter]

Excellent post!

Where I really have a problem with Google is that it's (suspected) use of Analytics and Webmaster Tools data is creating a whole new problem in the form of black-hat sabotage.

One tactic that is gaining in popularity is the creation of robots that search Google for various terms and then leave the pages found through the search results after only a second or two. The reason for this is rooted in a suspicion that this may trick Google into thinking that these pages are not relevant for the search term (as long as the publisher is using Analytics for tracking).

[Gab]

Err, a few things that are factually wrong, and a couple I disagree with.

First, what I like:
"What am I talking about, you say? Here's the crux of it - "Relevancy" is a subjective concept that the search engines are attempting to determine by objective means. You cannot determine a qualitative measure by using a purely quantitative analysis. "
Yes, and G et al have recognized this. Hence Yahoo implementing social elements (esp where the searcher was involved in said media and is logged into into their Yahoo account) rankings. And G using personalized search, which does the same but not relying on social media data.
Just 2 examples off the top of my head..

"

And so what's happened is this. With the exception of the farthest reaches of the long-tail, adding your target keywords (or phrases) to your Title and Meta Tags and on page copy and then throwing in some H1s and BOLD tags for good measure cannot enable the search engines to determine the most relevant page for any search term given the fact that there are likely hundreds of other sites out there that have done the same thing for the same search terms. So what we're left with, then, is Page Rank. "

Fairly good statement of the problem PR solves.

Here's where I know that you're wrong, factually.
"

Google revolutionized internet advertising through contextualized CPC ads. Suddenly advertisers were given control over when their ad was shown and could determine how much they were willing to pay for the acquisition of that online visitor. Highly measurable, ROI could easily be determined and in many cases even an arbitrage was created.

And then everybody looked to their left a little. And what they saw were the natural search results, just sitting there, promising free traffic. No CPC, if only my site was on the front page....

Thus was SEO born. "

1) Goto introduced CPC/ppc advertising afaik. Then it got copied. Prior to PPC, AdWords used banner ads rented monthly, fyi. That's per Andrew GOodman's Winning Results With Google AdWords, and he is THE guy on it.

2) SEO was in existence before Google. Look at Frederick Marckini's stuff. He founded iProspect (huge SEO firm with mostly Fortune 500 clients) and wrote SEO books in the 90s.

Finally, where I subjectively disagree is the indiscriminate value assigned to links. The intuitive proof is that most people would rather get linked by a major news outlet than some tiny blogger, as far as link power goes. Non intuitively, I think the PR paper itself references different scoring/value for links. And Matt Cutts himself has given specific examples of links that were discounted.

[Tin Pig]

Gab -

Thanks for your thoughtful comments on this post.

Your first point is well taken - though I was trying to highlight Google's move into Contextualized CPC. I don't think GoTo was doing that, though I could be wrong (it's early and I'm not up to the research just yet. I'll look into it deeper a bit later).

Your second point is dead-on. I was generalizing too much.

For your last point, if I emphasised an indiscriminate link-value assignment too much, that wasn't my intent. As you state, anybody in their right mind would rather be linked-to from the NYTimes.com than TinPig.com, but barring most people's ability to get links from the few PR9 sites out there, many times it simply comes down to volume of back links. And, yes, per the algorithm, a few back-links from higher PR sites would be bettern than many from low PR sites, but again sometimes you just have to take what you can get. So, what most SEOs do is go after forums and blogs and link-tradning agreements and so forth - manufacturing links rather than having them spawned naturally. It's the naturally created links that are, perhaps, a good measure of relevancy. The manufactured ones, however, are not and that's where my issue lies.

[Gab "SEO ROI" Goldenberg]

Well, on that last point, we agree somewhat. Manufactured links that no one clicks on are crap. Like many forum links, blog links etc. BUT: Press releases that get picked up by the major media are also manufactured by marketing people, so I don't know that 'manufactured' v 'non-manufactured' is a good measuring stick. I'd say that traffic from the links is a better one.