The rumored death of SEO

There have been some major changes at the famous California Googleplex of late – and it’s had some people wondering if search engine optimization is still a viable marketing approach. It most definitely is!

Here’s why.

Google, the search engine giant, has been applying its algorithms to ranking websites since the company’s inception, way back in 1997. The reason it has a dominant market share (70 percent in the United States) is that its search engine answers questions correctly.

It just plain works.

But once the company’s name became a verb (“Google it”), finding ways of gaming the system was inevitable. Spammers by the score would try to best the engine and get their websites to come up first in results. They did this by any number of nefarious means, including putting white words on a white background, so people wouldn’t see the keywords they were stuffing their sites with, but Google would.

It didn’t take long for Google to uncover those lame attempts at ranking illegitimately. They then tweaked their algorithms (the computer programs that find the appropriate ranking clues on a site) to punish the offenders.

Everyday a new trick was tried, and in response, a Google ‘slap’ – what the punishments came to be called. A ‘slap’ puts a site down in the rankings or out of the rankings altogether.

Then something more all-encompassing was attempted. The wily geeks at thousands of aggressive websites came up with another solution to get to the first page of Google. Knowing that the search engine saw “popularity” as a key factor in a website’s credibility, and that links from other popular sites were a strong indicator for Google of such “street cred,” they created numerous back and forth links between sites. This often cost money to participate in.

That’s where Penguin has come in. Effective April and said to affect 3 percent of websites worldwide, this was a peculiarly named update intended to put an end to the paid link farms described above, or what Google calls “unnatural links.” Plus it should force spammers to stop arbitrarily stuffing keywords throughout a website.

This move was necessary to clean up the Internet neighborhood, have results be relevant to a searcher’s query and let the really good content float back to the top, uninterrupted by spammers.

Is this the death knell that people say it is for SEO? Heck no. It’s the death knell for spammers who were unfairly getting attention for garbage sites. Porno. Gambling. Russian brides. Bogus directories. Stuff like that.

Now legitimate websites can practice their white-hat SEO as usual without being tempted to go to the dark side: providing great, relevant content that’s useful to find and is written with niche keywords as hooks to help sites get found legitimately.

Phew!

The rumors about SEO being dead are far from accurate. But black-hat SEO is being carried out on a stretcher – and that’s a huge relief.

Laurie Macomber, owner of Fort Collins-based Blue Skies Marketing, can be reached at laurie@blueskiesmktg.com or 970-689-3000.

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