Are We Dead Yet
Posted On: 2012-10-11
Once again someone has raised the question that gets asked every so often ... is SEO dead? Has Google finally managed to kill off search engine optimisation?
Over on Webmaster World an interesting discussion has been going on about what we should be doing now that Panda and all the other algorithmic changes that Google has introduced have made SEO so difficult and it's definitely worth your while heading over there and having a look because things have changed.
You may not have noticed those changes if you rely on link lists and such for your traffic but if you've been playing the search engine game too then you'll know just how much things have changed. We've also seen other things pointing to those changes too and it's obvious that many of the lower-grade SEO companies are beginning to feel the pinch.
There has always been plenty of spam emails hitting our inboxes ... and those of our clients ... from companies that want to guarantee top of the first page rankings but since Panda ... and Penguin ... really began to bite the emails have stopped and now they're cold-calling direct from the United States, India and wherever else they may be. They're not even bothering with Skype ... they're just picking up the phone and making international calls.
So those SEO companies that promised more than they could deliver but somehow managed to wing it are struggling. The old simple SEO techniques of keywords, meta tags and loads of weak links are becoming redundant but does that mean SEO is dead ... even the limited amount of SEO that you might apply to your adult sites and what can you do to ensure that future algorithm changes don't cause you major dramas?
Google's favourite mantra is all about providing useful content and if you head over to Webmaster World you will hear that repeated but is that really the answer?
Some suggest offering a product that is different to what most other people are offering is the answer and maybe that's a possibility too ... for some people in some situations ... but we can't all be offering different products and here in adult the number of products we have to offer is very definitely limited.
So what do we do now?
Actually that's something that has been exercising our collective minds here in my office. While our clients still expect the old forms of SEO to work we know that they simply don't work as well as they once did so we've been looking at what we should be offering our clients.
We've come up with a few ideas that we're testing but one thing is very definitely obvious. The SEO techniques that were easy to implement and took little time have gone. Now it's all going to be time-consuming and involve lots of hard work and you need to go back and look at all the options you once dismissed as being of little value.
We also need to be aware that changes that might have an impact on our rankings are more than just Penguin and Panda. If you want to continue to rank well in Google ... or you want to achieve good rankings in Google then you need to start studying it in depth.
When you do that you begin to realise that Google measures a lot more than the amount of content you have on your site and the number of weak links that might point to your site. There's a page algorithm that looks at your page layout and measures the ratio of content to ads that appears on each page of your site and that same algorithm also looks at where those ads are placed in relation to the content.
Don't expect a good ranking if Google thinks that people have to scroll through a heap of ads to reach the content on your site. Google doesn't really care about whether or not those ads put food on your table ... all Google wants to do is appear to give the surfers that it sends to your site a good experience.
Of course it can be very frustrating to look at the sites that you have worked so hard to produce getting dropped in the rankings simply because Google doesn't like you putting too many ads on our web pages. It can be equally frustrating to not achieve the rankings you think you deserve simply because Google's algorithm think s your content is garbage. But if you want Google's traffic then you've got to work your nuts off to get it.
Of course now that all that simple SEO may be dead is it worth taking your SEO to the next level?