askmatt

In 2001 SEO was pretty easy and you could get good listings by just changing the title tags of a page and repeat your keywords as often as possible throughout the page. There were ‘off page factors’ like inbound links but it was simple to get these, signing guest books and a link exchange could get you hundreds of links in a couple of days.

Over the next couple of years things got a little more difficult, as more people discovered how to optimize their pages, more people tried to ‘game’ the system.

In 2003 Google launched Adsense, a system that paid website owners for showing Google Adwords on their websites. This was a turning point for SEO. Anyone who knew how to get top positions in the SERPS had the opportunity to show adverts on their visitor and earn revenue from them without having to pursue clients and persuade them to hire them as an SEO consultant.

Whilst a large percentage of SEO experts went on to produce their own sites and live off the revenue that Adsense gave them, a few decided to write books on SEO, or promote SEO through websites and e-mail newsletters.

The current crop of SEO consultants who are often fronted by a team of telemarketers are using the knowledge that they discovered in these books and email newsletters, and offering optimization services.

The problem is that the knowledge that they have gleaned is old knowledge, SEO is dead, inbound links mean nothing these days, search engines have found better ways to analyse how to position a site than relying on how many pages links to it.

Smart second generation SEO consultants moved on to become usability consultants and then social networking consultants!

And now in 2011 where the likes of Google have toolbars installed in millions of browsers reporting back user behavior, and on page analytics providing information on users who do not have the toolbar installed, there are still companies offering to find backlinks to improve search engine rankings!

It’s easy for Google to determine how good a website is or how relevant it is to a users search. A simple test for a shopping search, say “Buy a safe for storing DVDs”, would be to log the page clicked on and all subsequent pages and see if the user eventually clicked on an https:// link without returning to the search engine or visiting another site. This would indicate that a transaction had taken place and the visitor had found what they we’re looking for. This is a pretty simple task for a toolbar to perform, it’s an equally simple to task to store the percentage of people who do go through to an https:// page and rank that page higher than sites that never lead to an https:// page.

The question is do Google want to position sites that are selling safes, that are suitable for storing DVDs, in the organic results for this search? Commercially it doesn’t make much sense for them, they have at least 10 PPC adverts on the page that will generate them money if the user clicks on them. If the visitor clicks on a free organic link then they make no money, unless the site is running Adsense or allows payment through Google Checkout.

Obviously Google has to provide relevant results or visitors will use another search engine, but as far as most visitors are concerned, the Adwords results are relevant for most shopping searches because no company can afford to place Adwords for products that they do not sell.

Google always claim that Adwords spend does not increase organic position. It might not directly influence organic position, but if Google give better position to sites which are more popular, then Adwords spending will increase the number of site visitors and as a result will increase a sites organic position.

This is a good result for Google and a good result for their advertisers, businesses paying for Adwords will not be able to compete on price with companies getting good organic positions with no advertising costs.

Oh good somebody else agrees with me … Micah ,