Having been involved in a lot of SEO work over the last few years, I can’t help but feel that search marketeers serve to distort the results that Google provide. The top ten results in any particular search are not necessarily the most relevant and authoritative sites, but merely the most expertly optimised. Are search engines being undermined by the SEO industry?
Google’s initial success was in part due to the novel idea of using hyperlinks as currency in a kind of vast voting system – a link to a site was regarded as a seal of approval thus increasing its perceived relevance and authority. This gave Google a cricual advantage over many of its rivals who were more concerned with the content on a web page.
Since Google’s emergence to a dominant position in the search engine maket, search engine optimisers have been concerned largely with building incoming links to their sites in order to improve their search engine rankings.
Over the years, this has turned into a game of “cat and mouse” between Google and search engine optimisers. As the optimisers develop new schemes for maximising incoming links in order to manipulate search results, so Google adjusts its algorithms to negate the effect of the more cynical approaches.
At first, optimisers were able to exploit Google’s reliance on links as a source of authority by getting their sites listed on the plethora of free online directories that sprang up. These “link farms” had no real value as genuine directories, but were a cheap way to obtain easy links.
Once the free directories began to be ignored by Google, optimisers began to pay for links on more credible subscription-based link farms. This enabled search engine optimisers to boost their sites through a careful process of consistent link-building that has little relation to a site’s authority and relevance.
More recently, this practice of buying links has started to be penalised by Google so search engine optimisers are looking elsewhere for their links. “Link baiting” techniques are the vogue now, involving a combination of blogging, social networking and content syndication to build incoming links to a site. Although this approach does at least emphasise the need to develop useful and authoritative content, it still represents an explicit attempt to distort search results.
Over time, Google may have become more difficult to distort and require more dedicated effort to manipulate, but the fact remains that an authoritative site in Google is first and foremost a well-optimised site. Search engines are failing to determine what the useful content is, and are not providing genuine, objective results.
The relative dominance of Wikipedia in search engine results provides a good example of this distortion. Wikipedia may be a fascinating collective online project, but given Wikipedia’s vulnerability to distortion and inaccuracy, it cannot be described as the most credible source of information out there. However, Google seems to believe that it is and gives Wikipedia dominance for an astonishing range of search terms.
Why should this be a problem? Search marketers argue that search engine optimisation is just another form of competitive marketing – the online equivalent of posting billboards, buying advertising space in magazines and sending junk mail.
This is not necessarily the case, as traditional offline marketing materials are generally clear about their intention: they are advertising and are clearly interpreted as such by consumers. Search engine results, on the other hand, are widely interpreted as being a source of authoritative information. Do the users of search engines realise that what they are seeing are more often than not the results of long-term marketing campaigns?