It seems to happen often, a change occurs and SEOs feel the “sky is falling”. It happens again. Google has been serving personalized searches for a couple of years now, but SEOs really didn’t care because a person had to be logged into their Google account. This didn’t happen often, so it didn’t stress SEOs out.
And then it happens … Google announces they are going to serve personalized results whether the user is logged in or not. SEOs are freaking out because “optimization” now takes on a whole new definition because nothing was consistent. Well, nothing was consistent before … due to the fact that depending on where you lived, you were served different results from different data centers. Why no complaints then?
I agree with Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable – I’m not worried about this. SEO is the same as it always has been. You can’t concentrate on ranking alone, as rankings fluctuate. You have to concentrate on click-through rates, time on page, and conversion rate. Focusing just on ranking is a waste of time. You have to ensure once they get to the page, their process is as easy as possible so conversion can occur.
Google doesn’t owe anything to you, it isn’t a service you pay for and they have the right to change it to make it better for them. They have no responsibility to make it better for you. It is their business, their money making the organic listings work. Deal with change. Don’t whine and don’t bitch. Instead, find a solution that meets your needs. It is out there – go find it.
Simon Wharton says
Plus ca change…
It is as it always is. Mind you, I still have that conversation with clients trying to explain why it isn’t all about just ranking for some crass term or other. Mind you, those are the advanced clients. I have others who still doubt that businesses use the web for anything other than porn.
ImproveYourJobSkills.com says
Eventually it’s going to just in full circle and google will be a pay for inclusion search engine, if you remember the popular GoTo.com search engine some years ago you could just bid on being the highest listing. Well Google is not far off and it’s almost to the point that it’s impossible to get on page one of a good search term unless of course you spend money with them and buy adsense adds.
So it’s basically a search engine that give you results on ‘what google thinks is important to show you’ unless of course you pay them off and buy some adds.
SEO is almost useless at this point and in five years we will look back and laugh at the term SEO since it won’t exist anymore.
Of course I could be wrong.
Jerry West says
GoTo.com is alive and well as it is Yahoo! Search Marketing. If Yahoo! didn’t purchase GoTo.com, they would have folded due to their reach was weak and click fraud was high. Saying SEO is “almost useless” is quite short-sighted to say the least. Many affiliates continue to make six-figure incomes a month purely on organic SEO. Projecting where the market will be in five years is useless as well as things change in this industry rapidly every 6-8 months, let alone five years.
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