SEO Is Dead? Are You Smoking Crack?
Posted on | December 23, 2009 | No Comments
Was reviewing my twitter stream the other day, which led me to a handful of interesting posts over at the Shoemoney blog about how SEO is is being rendered irrelevant by social media and facing an impending demise.
Before I continue, let me just say I have tremendous respect for Shoemoney; he is a smart, successful businessman, and you would be a moron to dismiss out of hand anything he writes or is written on a blog with his name. Now that we have that out of the way, I have to say, I think the premise that SEO is dying, or threatened by social media, is bullshit.
I know these little holy wars flare up from time to time and I am normally happy to watch from the sidelines. In this case, however, I really wanted to take a look at the arguments against SEO and respectfully set the record straight -
- Real time search will kill Google/SEO - SEOs who know what they are doing and understand search behavior have nothing to fear from RTS. People love to talk about it now, but I think they are way way way overestimating the public’s appetite for it. As time goes on, there is a good chance it’ll turn out to be a novelty that’s truly useful less frequently than lapsed Catholics go to Mass. The current implementations are way too raw and even if Google or another engine perfected them, the number of queries RTS would impact would be shockingly small.
- Users will flock from link-based algorithms to social-based ones - Somehow Facebook search is going to out-google Google because they can leverage the recommendations and opinions of people I did kegstands with in college? Now if I were searching for things like ‘natty light’ that might be awesome, but other than that, I don’t see where the benefit is. If I wanted to know what site/service/product my friends recommended, I’d ask them, I wouldn’t search Google or Facebook. (I love this argument because you so often hear it from people who can talk for hours about how great social media is without ever mentioning money.)
- Local search will kill SEO - When it’s the middle of the night and your toilet stops working and you need a plumber, you’re going to tweet about it? Maybe, but only after looking them up in the phone book or doing a search on your phone. There are already hundreds of talented SEOs out there helping companies optimize their sites for exactly this scenario, so it’s tough to see how SEO will be hurt by local search.
- Google will or can prevent humans from impacting its algorithm – I have heard this one before, and it never made sense to me – even if it were possible, why would you want it? From content creation to querying, humans are so entrenched in the search process that the idea of eliminating them from the search component seems almost absurd, and that’s if it were possible in the first place.
SEO is not going anywhere in the near future – every year since 1995, people have been saying SEO is dead and every year they have been wrong.Is there any reason to think that 2010 will be any different? Absolutely not.
Will people continue to claim SEO is dead or dying? Of course. There are too many people who don’t understand searchers or don’t ‘get’ search search engines (links above excluded) for these claims to stop. Besides, there is too much to gain by being contrarian (or dogmatic).
Every year people will continue to claim SEO is on its last legs, and each year they’ll be proven wrong. I think Aaron Wall summed it up best with this quote from the SEOBook blog -
So long as search engines display a list of sites, for which payment is not required, SEO will exist.
How SEO is done will change. It has always changed.
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