Eco-friendly flip flops and the Death of SEO

In the Guardian today, there was a piece about how Bobby made a site about “eco-friendly flip flops” and using simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, got to the top of Google remarkably easily. They’re right. It can be easy at times but far from revealling how unscrupulous devils are “sneaking” up the Google search results for fun and profit, it revealled a naievety about the whole area of SEO.

There are two areas of SEO work, what’s called “White Hat” and “Black Hat”. The white being the “good guys”, not doing what Google ask you not to do. The Black guys being much naughtier.

The first “Black Hat-ism” in all this is the terminology, it makes it sound like there’s some wizardry going on with SEO. There really isn’t. Yes at times it can seem like magic, being suddenly top of Google’s results, but it isn’t really. All the techniques to get to the top of Google are very well documented, both “good” and “bad”. You make the choice about whether it’s worth the risk, and effort, to employ Black Hat techniques and get banned by Google.

The “real black hat” of SEO are these clever tricks, which are not about wizardry but trickery. If you want to set yourself up as a “Black hat” SEO company, after using a blog-spammer and registering a few thousand domains, arrange some link exchanges and you’re pretty much ready-to-go… and then all you have to do is…

• Convince your client to pick really stupid search terms, like “eco-friendly flip flops”. The competition is going to be low on unique terms like “worm banana boomerang”.
• Convince your clients that you have “all the secrets”… drop into the conversation that you’ve discovered that Google likes meta keywords that begin with vowels… or something equally stupid…
• Convince your client to only search in the UK results… making the competition much lower, that’s always a good one
• Get to the top of the results for one week only and then show your client… staying there is much much harder

All the above tricks are about sleight of hand, fooling the client, not Google, and very like being a con artist.

It’s my feeling now that SEO as we know it is dead. Google have too much to lose, i.e everything, by being “fooled” by SEO companies. SEO companies have too much to lose by not being able to get to the top of Google in an afternoon like they used to do, forcing more and more SEO firms to turn to the Black Hat. Black Hat techniques being easier to “spot” using technology they get wiped out.

The whole process is now is a very tight loop in which two very rich technological opponents, Google and the millions of SEO firms are in a constant battle to outsmart the other, and for me, SEO has lost its initial fun and charm.

It just seems to me that all the alternatives to “getting to the top of Google” are so much more fun. What are those alternatives? Well that’d be telling…