According to Leo Laporte of TWIG (This Week in Google), SEO will in fact be dead in about 6 months. Laporte was one of the speakers at the recent search marketing conference, Pubcon, a forum designed to promote the search industry and solve its collective problems. Laporte’s remarks stirred up quite a controversy.
“Google is in deep trouble right now. And if I were your business, I would really be looking at alternatives to search engine marketing and search engine optimization.”
These statements were most likely not welcoming words for an audience full of search marketers. Laporte believes Apple is poised to take over the search world with its new Siri technology. He mentioned the rise and fall of many companies such as Microsoft and he is predicting that Google is next in line.
Laporte insists that Google+ isn’t living up to its expectations and Google is not as focused as companies like Facebook. These reasons will outline Google’s downfall. “There’s a big change going on and Google is not necessarily on the right side of it,” Laporte claims.
The Retaliation
On the other side of the camp, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, had some opposing words for Laporte.
He tried to lighten the disdain in the audience by jokingly saying, “Is PubCon Hawaii shut down because that’s more than 6 months from now? If you took all the times SEO was dead, you’d have a zombie character from the walking dead, right?”
Cutts went on to explain that SEO is not dead because it is a type of marketing and marketing always appeals to human nature. This dynamic will never go away. He likens SEO to coaching rather than strictly marketing. The job of an SEO is to ensure that website owners put their best face forward and present themselves in the best possible light. Since people will always need this type of service, SEO will always be in demand.
Cutts went on to talk about the mechanical nature of SEO in times past. He says that SEO has now moved to “appealing to human nature” more than keywords and metadata, etc. Furthermore, SEO is always changing and “the very best SEOs understand that you don’t want to go where search engines are, you want to go where search engines are going to be. And search engines are always going to provide users with the best search experience so as long as you are moving in the same direction, you are working with the search engines.”
The Real Crux of the Matter
Cutts addressed Panda and stressed that webmasters should contact Google if they feel their site was incorrectly downgraded as a result of any Panda updates. He states that no algorithm is perfect and by understanding the mistakes, Google can better refine the algorithms and improve upon them.
If any of the web marketers out there are still reading this and you believe SEO is not doomed just yet, Matt Cutts had some other interesting things to say about the future of SEO:
Long Term
Mobile – Website owners must pay more attention to how their sites appear on mobile browsers. Cutts mentioned how mobile basically represents the ability for people to carry their computers with them.
Social – He talks about an author’s reputation being available on the web and how social transparency would enhance it. Social is also an area that doesn’t really need to be optimized which is also a new trend toward change in the industry.
Local – Where the vast majority of concrete purchases takes place.
Shorter Term
Better Page Understanding – Google is in the process of understanding what is actually on a web page. What are the things that really matter? Cutts spoke about a current algorithm change under evaluation that would identify the amount of data above the fold. He mentioned that you might want to evaluate whether or not your content lives above the fold. Cutts states, “When someone lands on your page, in the first second do they see content? Or do they see something that is distracting or annoying?”
Personal Search – People will start feeling more comfortable sending more personal searches to Google.
Better Search Tools – Google is trying to give users options to search for more literal phrases instead of steering them in a direction they may not want. Cutts gives the example, “maybe you did want to search for the word carousel without the ‘u’”. He talks about a “verbatim” or “literal” mode that would allow searchers to query exact phrases.
Communication and Transparency – Was your WordPress site hacked? This is common since webmasters have to update the software themselves and they often cannot keep up with it. Google will give webmasters the ability to sign up for email alerts via webmaster tools. These alerts will warn them of any new software updates for WordPress and other software packages.
As far as transparency, Cutts talks about announcing algorithm changes so people can understand more about how Google works and not look at it like it is a black box.
Sending Info to Google – This is a preventive measure to inhibit scraper sites from ranking higher than the original content. This change is still in the early stages, but it looks promising.
Cutts also mentioned some other ways to keep up with Google changes such as signing up for Webmaster tools, turning on email alerts, setting up “fat pings”, and subscribing to pertinent blogs.
He also closed by saying, “I think search engines will be around for a little more than 6 months.”
If you want to see the videos of both Laporte and Cutts and also a Q & A session with Google software engineer Amit Singhal, visit Everspark Interactive.
Do you think SEO is doomed?
