SEO is Dead?

The view growing in the SEO community is that traditional SEO is being killed off by Web 2.0 and the growth of online social media. As search engines give increased rank to popular sites, the importance of profile within communities like Digg, Facebook and on YouTube is growing. Search engines aren't there to identify authority sites as many believe. Their priority isn't to identify sites with the best content. A site might be well organised - optimised for SEO - and heavily linked by commentators, but still not the site people want to see. Popularity is key. Search engines thrive by delivering the sites most people want to see. Feedback from click-throughs on search results and the Yahoo/Google toolbars are more likely to influence results than authority or backlinks. We've already seen the decline of on-site meta tags, of Google page rank. The theory goes that backlink strategies will be the next has been.

Image by Cibervolunteer under a GNU Free Documentation Licence, version 1.2

The reasons why most SEO and SMM experts think SEO is dead, and SMM doomed, are somewhat self-indulgent. At the most basic, they are saying that a technique only gives and advantage when a few are exploiting it: once many people are using a technique, it ceases to be a differentiator. So link building is dead because it no longer is a stand-out advantage - your competitors are doing the same thing. It's running to stand still. Worse, search engines are wise to the practice and are adjusting their algorithms to prevent it from affecting rankings to a significant degree.

But that still overlooks the biggest issue which is saturation. The image by the Internet Mapping Project, Bell Labs/Lumeta Corporation, shows the Internet on January 16th 2009. Scientist have calculated that the Internet's growth obeys Moore's law and will double ever 5.32 years. Personally I think that understates the likely impact of tools like Twitter - to be fair the statistic is based in 'autonomous systems' and not pages - and that the rate of growth of the Internet is accelerating. I the past it may have doubled every 5.32 years, but I suspect that could now be down to every 3 or 4 years and getting quicker all the time.

We've seen in on Squidoo. It's gone from 100k lenses to 1m lenses. Getting noticed is much harder. And it's that saturation that is the issue for both SEO and SMM. If a search term delivers 10,000 matches, getting to the top is relatively easy. If it delivers 100,000 matches, being in the top 10 - the magic first page of search engines - means being the best out of every 10,000 pages. Once that reaches 1m matches, being in the top ten translates to being the best out of every 100,000 lenses. And it's getting steadily worse.

Every time the Internet doubles in size, the effort required to get onto the first page doubles - or worse because the opportunities to influence search engines is reducing all the time for the reason we have seen.

Already some search terms are beyond the reach of individuals acting alone to influence. Individual Internet marketeers will be shunted into narrower and narrower niches were they stand some chance of getting noticed. But even for corporarations, major search terms are beyong their ability to influence. Other than the brand leaders, a company selling cameras is as unlikely to be able to influence the results of the search term "digital cameras". Corporatons too will find that the weight of the web is increasingly beyond their ability to influence directly. The Web will become "purer" as a result - but little consolation to those trying to make money on the Web.

So just as SEO is dead, I believe SMM is dead to - because the Web is getting too big and complex to influence to a material

My thougts on the future belong in another lens but I've given some hints in the two lenses above. Suffice to say here that I'd suggest reading books on these two topics ...

If you have any extra information or questions about this lens you can contact Kate Phizackerley, the lensmistress, using the contact form I have provided.

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