e_Marketing

In a post at Threadwatch.org, Nick Wilson concludes that "the harder this game becomes, the better off the industry will be." By "the industry" I assume he means the SEO industry -- not the web marketing industry or web marketers in general.


The rationale for this conclusion must be that the more unpredictable Google makes their ranking criteria, the more difficult it will be for web marketers to consistently score well in the Google rankings. And this in turn supposeldy makes good SEO knowledge and skills just that much more valuable. Marginal SEO practitioners will be weeded out because they don't understand the subtleties of the game.


Ironically, many people will be led to conclude something completely different about SEO -- namely that it is a waste of time and money. The extent to which this happens will depend on just how unpredictable the Google criteria become.


What is usually missed in this SEO navel gazing is the fact that this Google cat and mouse game is driven almost completely by money. As I have pointed out in other posts, SEO practitioners and webmasters often become self-righteous about protecting the integrity of the web's content, and we tend to see Google as the major protector of this integrity. But what is really driving Google is the desire to move people away from reliance on natural search to a much more lucrative reliance on paid search -- Adwords.


The more unpredictable they can make any given website's ranking in natural searches, the more likely that website will stay an Adwords customer. Conversely, if I know precisely how to get my site on the first page of Google, why would I bother buying Adwords?


I would not, just as I do not buy PPC ads on Yahoo or MSN precisely because their results are more predictable.


Google knows exactly what they are doing. And it has very little to do with the ethics of search or the integrity of the web.