The Webmaster Place

A lot of buzz has been created recently by reports heralding the “Death of AdSense” and the “Death of Marketing”. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of their deaths have been greatly exaggerated. But one thing that clearly is dying is search engine optimization (SEO).

I recently had a discussion with a top SEO guy (who will remain nameless to protect the innocent). He wrote an SEO book, has a popular SEO blog, etc. I asked him many questions about one of my sites which gets great SE traffic but could do better. I couldn’t get a straight answer from him.

Finally I asked him point blank “So what is SEO?” His response? “Link bait.”

Link bait, if you don’t already know, means trying various tricks to get lots of people to link to your site.

What he meant (based on the rest of the discussion before and after) was that there are so many factors involved in the search engine algorithms now that it is impossible to know exactly what will work and what won’t and why. The best one can do is not make mistakes, get things mostly right, and then try to generate lots of real, non-reciprocated inbound links. I would add to that that it is wise to create lots of unique content on many different pages in order to increase your odds of getting lucky.

That is not SEO — that is SEF — search engine friendliness. You do your best to do well on the SEs in general but you will have a very hard time targetting a specific engine for a specific keyword and guaranteeing results in advance.

But that is nothing. Real changes are coming that will bury SEO for good.

Already I have begun noticing different search engine results based on location and different Google AdSense ads showing up on different computers seemingly based on surfing habits. To me it is clear that in a few years it is clear that search results will vary from person to person based on their personal interests and histories.

IMHO, that is why Google is racing to get ahold of as much personal information as it can about people. Who controls Windows and your PC’s desktop, Internet Explorer, Word, Outlook, Excel and NotePad? Microsoft. Who could easily access the oodles of information about us stored in those various products and their related files if they wanted to? Microsoft. Who has a habit of leveraging their Windows assets to bury competitors? Microsoft.

Is it any wonder that Google is racing to set up Gmail, Google Desktop, the Google Toolbar, Google Groups, Blogger, the Google Calendar and much more? Sure it may be a simple push for hegemeny, but I think that it is also a strategy to survive. Bill Gates doesn’t like to lose, and Google has an awful lot to fear.

So be on the lookout for these changes as they happen. I am betting it will be real soon so plan accordingly.

On the other hand, maybe the new social networking sites will bury the search engines altogether.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Search engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.