Marketing Pilgrim - Latest Comments in Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

michael bian — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 02:59:40 -0000

I believe is wasn't..

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

alandot spiders — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 03:06:05 -0000

I will not know the future of SEO No one will
know what might happen in years down the road. SEO might be dead or it
may have a total facelift, who knows?

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Send Flowers To Singapore — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:02:37 -0000

Is SEO dea? Absolutely not! Infact on the contrary, it's thriving. With so much traffic going into SE, and businesses realizing online is a much smarter and trackable way to advertize, there'll be more and more businesses vying for Google/Yahoo top spot. What's changing is that it's going to be harder and harder to rank well with many more competing sites.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

dominick — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:40:39 -0000

At first I thought SEO is an dying industry too. But, after all, Greg and Shoemoney explain it pretty well. SEO is just going through temporary obstacles, if SEO can break through this obstacle, SEO can soon be in another level.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

YouGov — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 09:01:01 -0000

It probably is, at least by its historical definition. I think the industry will always be necessary as the workings of search engines is not really common knowledge in the lay community, but its role is likely to be providing information more than active optimisation.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Internet Entrepreneur — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:16:45 -0000

I agree that Google and the other SEs will be paying more and more attention to the ‘social voting’ system (which by the way can also be manipulated), content will become King again and you will need to provide more incentives in form of usability and interactivity so that people would link to your site (create your Brand awareness and loyalty). The interactive elements such as widgets, Flash and Java elements, AJAX, podcasts, etc. will most probably become ‘indexable’ at some point and will certainly require SEO. Internet will change, search engine algorithms will change, and SEO will evolve as well. May be at some point it will become more like Hi-Tech Marketing or smth like that.

Internet Entrepreneur's last blog post..Will the SEO era come to an end in 2 years?

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Misty Cryer-Davidson — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:14:50 -0000

SEO as we "used" to know it is definitely dead. The search engines are more concerned about content and tags that tell what the webpage is about. Link popularity is still valued, but reciprocal linking has pretty much gone to the dogs.

Misty Cryer-Davidson's last blog post..Internet News that you can trust!

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Kermit Johnson — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:34:51 -0000

I think the best advice is to just keep adding quality content because Google will soon be intelligent enough to just look for that. Google will be very good at figuring out what is natural.

In my industry, real estate sites that provide inventory and meaningful content will be the ones that survive.

Kermit Johnson's last blog post..Blaine MN MLS #3583203 is the Best Value in the Whole Anoka County Area!

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

franki — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:27:32 -0000

It may change as the Internet evolves but I really don’t believe good SEO will not go away.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Singapore SEO — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 03:03:41 -0000

I will not predict the future of SEO and put them in words. No one will know what might happen in years down the road. SEO might be dead or it may have a total facelift, who knows?

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

wayne — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:17:29 -0000

This posting is ridiculous. Reminds me of the tale that we are running out of oil in the next years that has been told for nearly half a century. But surprise, suprise we are constantly finding new oil (brazil, northpole, etc.) or the increased price makes other oil sources (oil sand) profitable.

As long as Google doesn't start to serve all the trillions of search request manually, people will be tweaking rankings. An algorithm is still an algorithm.

I recommend you to stop believing all the Google propaganda and just have a look at the SERPs and why sites rank or not. I took Google nearly 10 years to only get rid of the worst forms of spam.

Btw, Googles business model is not to run a search engine - it is about selling ads.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Branding is Dead — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:29:27 -0000

On the contrary, Search has killed Branding. Why would I go back to a specific store if I could just go online, search, find and buy.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Axcel — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:44:03 -0000

Nice linkbait topic and I agree with everyone who says seo isn't going anywhere, as I'm sure you know. It will just continue to evolve.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Jim — Sat, 10 May 2008 15:54:33 -0000

Hogwash indeed.
As one who is not fond of SEO per say I would have to agree with nay sayers. As long as there are websites, search engines and the desirte to rank high on the search results,I hate to say it but SEO's will exits. The reason is there will always be those who want to take a pill to remedy anything. In other words, take the easy way out. However, SEO as known today or practiced today will die or will evolve as have other industries before it.

Jim's last blog post..SEO Made Easy!

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Numetrick — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:36:05 -0000

Hogwash!

Google and other engines alike are investing(will be investing)in technology that will soon be able to crawl and index complex scripts for information such as Javascript and Flash.

Like others have said the pinnings of SEO will change whereby SEO's will need to focus on wider communities, information architecture and usability.

It wont be so much about on page factors anymore but more about content and user experience. How useful is the information on your site and how user friendly your site is. These factors will decide/continue to decide who gets the link from other webmasters and more importantly so linking will still have a weighting.

How else can an engine decide how important a brand/website is other than finding a means of checking references towards it.

If its not links it will indeed be something contextual or referential which helps engines gauge relevancy.

The whole point of search is that it is supposed to give un-baised search results when it comes to organic listings. So why would Google and other engines go out of their way to promote a large brand purely because hey have a prominent brand? This is a poor user experience by any means and users will soon find alternative methods to find information once they catch on.

Going even further if SEO's are not optimizing for SE's they will be optimizing the next type of web search facility, platforms are constantly evolving.

SEO dead? do some homework.

People are already aware of paid search and how manipulated they are...if organic results become like this people will soon abandon them.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Sherrie — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:35:39 -0000

I disagree and even making that comment is similar to Bill Gates saying that 1 MB of memory would be quite sufficient, within a year he was proved very wrong. SEO will evolve and to comment otherwise is asinine. I have have been doing this for many sites since 1998 and it has already evolved.
I have to think that you must just say whatever pops into your head in order to have something to say, stop being a talking head.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Nate Desmond — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:46:16 -0000

Thought provoking article, but I disagree. SEO is not about trying to force or trick the search engines into putting your site high in the SERPS. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, not Search Engine Tricking. However, I also believe that Black Hat SEO will also continue to evolve along with the search engine's algorithims.

Nate Desmond's last blog post..Give Your Business a Great Name!

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Nicole — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:23:25 -0000

I certainly hope it's not a dying industry.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Frank Reed — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:15:21 -0000

Wow. Nothing like an extreme view to get some reaction from folks. Personally, I think Shoemoney is a sensationalist who has done just what you suggest Greg; built his brand. Many times hype trumps content / reality. This is certainly a case in point. To say SEO is dying is pretty ridiculous. To say it is evolving is realistic. I like reality personally.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Kyle Watters — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:43:15 -0000

SEO has way more things involved other than just Links and the links you do have both out going and incomming links must be strong to help you. Weak links will just bring your site down. Links are only one part of SEO.

Establish your web site objectives, take a look at your META's to make sure they are done right as well as check existing search engine ranking, web site traffic, results, and determine where the gaps might be.

Study your competitors and determine what they are doing right and where you can improve your efforts.

Examine your web site’s content for quantity and quality – whether it is relevant and appropriately keyword-dense for your search engine ranking goals.

Ensure that each page of your web site is optimized at the structural and code levels.

Maintain consistent branding and usability throughout your web site – although it’s now optimized for search engine “robots”, everything still has to look right for the rest of us!

Well written content is the key. You must have rich content that is relevent to your product and your keywords, discription and title must also be relevent.

Doorway pages, domain cloaking, keyword stuffing, link farms or other gimmicks to make your site seem to be more than it is will get your site blacklisted by the engines.

This is just a little touch on SEO as there is even more involved however I do not have time to talk about it right now.

If you would like help with SEO come and visit us at our website.

SEO is not even close to dead. I have tried sites without it and with it and sites without it had barley any traffic. Sites I did SEO to had hundreds and thousands more targeted traffic.

Thanks for reading and have a great day.
kyle

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Brian Donohue — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:24:11 -0000

Here's a problem in our era of Karl Rove dialectics: the very wise observations of "CSSteve" are brushed aside with a brusque, evidence-free, "go back to basics" dismissal. Could it be that what CSSteve is saying is what I encourage my counseling clients to reflect upon: that when we nurture the substance, the core truth of a relationship, a product, situation, or the individual self, the image ("branding") will take care of itself? It would appear that this is precisely what consumers and (this year) voters are saying: we want substance, meaning, durability -- not 8 years' worth of spin and veneer.

Brian Donohue's last blog post..7 Heaven

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

JeffBHost — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:06:01 -0000

Anybody that says that, has to go back to basics.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

CSSteve — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:50:17 -0000

I am afraid you and Shoemoney have totally missed the mark here. The concept that SEO is dead or even dying because search engines are “too smart” for it to work, demonstrates a lack of understanding. What you are missing is that these new smarter search engines are exactly what makes SEO more successful and more necessary than ever. Google, Yahoo and the others have no desire to develop and impenetrable hierarchy. The world you describe is a world where only companies that are large and successful deserve good search results. As if only Coke and Pepsi should be selling soda pop and all new brands and flavors are just scam artist trying trick consumers into accidentally trying their product. That type of innovation stifling corporate dominance is not what the internet is all about. In fact it goes against the free market in general not to mention downright un-American. If the search engines ever did take that path, you can bet they would lose market share. If anything has proven true about internet users, it is that we don’t like to be force fed the same old mainstream propaganda. That is what the television is for and the search engine owners know it.

I think anyone can appreciate the value of branding. But let’s get real here. You are putting the cart before the horse. All the branding in the world will do you no good without great exposure. Most of us will agree that there is no better exposure in the world than the 1st page or a relevant search. So before we declare SEO dead, let’s take a good look at just how well they work. The internet search is not so incredibly popular by accident.

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Brian Donohue — Fri, 09 May 2008 06:48:22 -0000

In Mitch Albom's now-classic memoir on the death of his teacher, Tuesdays With Morrie, he tells the story of an evening at a college basketball game. The crowd started chanting "we're number one!", loudly and stridently, until Morrie stood up and shouted a question: "what's wrong with being number two?"

The chant stopped as the kids suddenly turned within and asked themselves a question that had probably never occurred to them.

Brian Donohue's last blog post..Guns, God, and GTA IV

Re: Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Nicole — Fri, 09 May 2008 06:45:39 -0000

Thank God for some plain speaking in the blogsphere for a change. The concluding advise is also absolutely bang on target. Great post.