newmediaMike

The end of SEO?

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I nearly had a heart attack this morning when I came across this headline on a new blog I came across. The writer had just started following me and as is my practice I checked out his blog.

According to “the next web” - The end of SEO, powered by Google is at hand. However upon further investigation what the author is really stating is that gaming the search engines or practicing black hat SEO is doomed. Well of course it is. Ethical white hat SEO will never go out of style.

I also take offense at the author lumping white hat with black hat SEO practitioners.

… it’s these people calling themselves SEO’s. They claim they can game the SERP’s (results) thus getting companies to the top. Google have been fighting a war on this front for years and with this latest update it looks like they have finally cracked it…
… In this update we have seen the effectiveness of normal SEO ‘tricks’ officially scuppered. There are no secrets anymore …

Yes Google is effectively shutting the door on black hat techniques and it’s about time. Black hat SEO such as keyword stuffing, invisible text and other nasty tricks were shunned many years ago. Good SEO is also logical SEO. Does your URL reflect the topic of the page? Does the title carry on this theme? Is your description relevant to your tile, URL and content? Is your content relevant to your URL and title? Are others linking to you using the same words? These are good SEO techniques and I seriously doubt Google would penalize site for following these steps in optimizing.

I also disagree with what the author says about Google penalizing new sites for two years. None of my sites are two years old and yet they rank well. Even my latest site seoservicestoronto.com is in the top 100 after only a few weeks for the term “seo services in Toronto”. The author goes on to state that Google will penalize sites that appear to be too professionally optimized, he means gamed or tricked out. He even uses the word tricked many times.

He concludes by saying that the only way to get good rankings in the future will be to pay Google in one form or another. Google may be considered evil by some but I’m hoping they aren’t THAT evil!

No honest ethical white hat SEO will always help a site with the on site aspect of SEO. Organic links are growing and Google is putting more emphasis on them, which makes sense.

I’m preparing another post which will talk about why this is a great time to be getting involved in SEO.