SEO is dead. Long live SEO.
In any complex industry, there will be a lot of differentiation between actors, and how they accomplish or offer what may appear on the surface, to be similar services, goals and products.
SEO is no different. In SEO, we have various hats (black, white, offwhite, grey, blue) which represent the tactics, markets and styles with which SEO has been pursued.
For example;
Rand Fishkin may be very aware of high level Google search changes through conferences and social networking, while unaware of what link building tools thousands of SEOs are using.
Matt Cutts may be on the Google Web Spam team, and yet be unaware of spammy tactics people have been successfully exploiting for over 6 years.
Bob the Affiliate SEO may know of 10 different sources for backlinks, or behaviors in Google Bot which gives him a significant ranking edge, unaware of algorithmic tweaks and changes at Google.
In this sense, SEO has always been asymmetric. Everyone has different knowledge, and there are no standard methods in an industry based primarily around one search engine.
Which makes good sense as search results are a zero sum game. Zero sum games breed intense competition and differentiation.
This lack of consistent information has been the norm for some time, and yet from the earliest days of Google, everyone knew what Larry and Sergey planned with the search algorithm. We knew how PageRank is calculated. We understood the place of linking, and the value of anchor text.
While we didn’t know the equation, we knew enough variables to come up with best practices. Links good. Anchor text great. Keyword in URL, solid.
Then it changed.
Last year, Google released Panda update and recently Penguin update, turning everything we knew about SEO upside down.
Now with Panda, Google is judging our on-page factors, yet we don’t know what the variables are. With Penguin, Google is punishing link optimization, and again we don’t know what the variables are.
Compounding this, Google has hurt the rankings of many innocent sites with these updates, both of which are far from perfect or precise, or if I wanted to be less charitable, completely arbitrary.
So where do we go from here?
I think Rand Fishkin has won. I was already on the inbound marketing bandwagon before Panda hit, and I haven’t consistently checked rank position in almost 2 years.
Before Rand does his victory lap, let’s remember that every success contains the seed of a future defeat.
Inbound marketing is about to get a lot more attention. The people who are coming over from affiliate SEO to mainstream SEO are highly motivated, aggressive and much smarter than the folks typically found posting SEOmoz blog comments.
My guess is that in 12-24 months the whitehat enterprise SEOs will get a run for their money. SEOmoz, Raven Tools, they are all going to be in the cross-hairs of people who are very talented hustlers. Folks who will take all of the energy and millions of dollars they put into link building, and focus that into dominating content, analytics and social media.
Regardless, we should all be happy about the triumph of inbound marketing, because it signals an end to the dependence on Google and obsession with their (now) opaque algorithm.
Change is the one thing we can all count on, all of the time. With one hand, change gives, and with the other it takes away.
About The Author: Anand works at CommunitySEO, a moderated web directory.
Interesting guest post… I’ve definitely been seeing a shift towards content marketing/inbound marketing, especially after the Penguin update hit.
What are your thoughts, Jack? DFB still working out for you?
I still use DFB, but I don’t use it much for my established sites. I use it mostly for tiered backlinking. I’ve also found it great for ranking YouTube vids, incidentally, primarily using the bookmark blasts.
As far as SEO in general, like I talked about in my last post, I’m focusing on my “quality” sites. My farm of thin sites isn’t worth much anymore and will probably disappear according to domain expirations while I focus on the branded sites. Obviously inbound marketing goes hand in hand with such sites.
At the end of the day, like with any business, the ones who adapt and innovate will consistently find success.
I enjoyed the juxtaposition between Bland Fishkin, Matt Cunts and Bob the awesome guy.
I think black-hatters will learn to adapt to the updates. Google SEO has always been a game of cat and mouse, and the mouse has made its move. Sure it’ll get much harder, but some people want to be on the dark side simply to be on the dark side. Even if it takes the same amount of effort to game the search engines as it does to produce high quality content and build relationships, many people will opt for the former.
I’m surprised nobody is more active at reverse engineering the Google SERPs. How hard would it really be to scrape the SERPs for thousands of keywords, check the backlink profiles and then try to identify certain patterns? Maybe somebody is already doing this, in which case they’re extremely quiet and also wildly rich.
But you’re right — Working toward a grand vision is WAY more rewarding than trying to learn how to cheat at a rigged game for the sake of temporarily accumulating more rupees.
Yes, long live white hat!
Or should I say, off-white hat.
My personal belief on SEO is that it will always be with us, the same way complicated tax avoidance schemes will always be with us.
Both tax codes and SEO algorithms are, by virtue of the problems they solve, very complicated. And wherever there is extreme complexity combined with a financial reward for finding loopholes, loopholes will be found.
I agree with you about the move to inbound marketing. I’ve always been on the sidelines of SEO, as most of my business is generated through word-of-mouth, and I have noticed a sea-change in the way a lot of people are viewing their business.
I don’t think that’s entirely down to the Google update though. Structural problems with the affiliate marketing industry, and increasingly aggressive government regulation of popular AM niches have also contributed. A sudden drop in ranking & income due to the updates just provided enough anger/fear /frustration to overcome the inertia.