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Choose your own SEO adventure Posted: Monday 12th May, 2008

SEO is Dead

I keep reading articles about the future of SEO being grim if not non-existent. The reason for this is the increasing reliance on user data as a major ranking factor. This data is taken from Google's toolbar and also click through's from search results.

This is not a new thing, Google's now infamous Historical Data patent back in 2005 mentioned the use of click through's (CTR) as a measure of a website's importance: "how often the document is selected when the document is included in a set of search results" as well as scoring based on the "extent to which the document is selected over time... when included in a set of search results".

Now with more and more people using the Google Toolbar and Analytics (did you ever question why such a great piece of software was free?) Google is amassing large volumes of user data that can be thrown into the equation when it comes to ranking websites. But what does all this mean for professional SEOs?

Well, some say that our future is bleak People will simply have to make great websites that get lots of visitors and they will naturally rank well. A question springs to mind:

  1. how do you get your website to the top of the search engine listings (SERPs) in the first place so you can get a high CTR?

Clearly other ranking factors will continue to be important as CTR and user data cannot rank a set of websites in isolation.

Also, this whole concept of site's being ranked on popularity makes me think of social media and Web 2.0. For example, how does a news story get to the top of Digg? or a video to the front page of YouTube? Yes they are the most dugg and most viewed, as judged by the community. So does this mean that the job of a professional SEO will become more that of a clicker, spending all day hiding behind a multitude of IP address' clicking our client's search results listings? NO! (at least I hope not).

I believe that SEO work will continue along the same lines that it has always been on:- helping people make their site's more user friendly and accessible. Pure white hat SEO has always been based on creating great content for your users and making it accessible to all (remember that search engine's are blind and deaf users), so surely if you stick to these mantra's you will faire well as we move into a more user centric web.

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