SEO will be dead

#1

Sorry for the pretentious title.
But this is what I truly started to believe many years ago.

Each time I open Google and search for something, I’m overwhelmed with dozens of articles written not by professionals, but by content makes and SEO gurus.
The initial goal of such articles is not to help, but to sell a service. The quality of content is much lower than if an answer is given by a passionate professional.

Another lame thing is that content writes will always provide texts with a number of characters recommend by SEO gurus. So even if you ask Google a simple yes-no question, you will still have to read 300-2500 words.

This makes my search experience worse. More often I search directly in communities and forums (e.g. Stackoverflow), not in Google.

This is actually a signal for the “not evil” corporation. If it gives bad search results, people will not use it.

This is why I believe we will meet huge changes in the ranking algorithms. To save money Google needs to save the quality and therefore learn how to detect content made by real experts.

Therefore I think the best SEO strategy today is investing in yourself.
Invest in your skills and experience, get yourself to know valuable rare stuff. Become a professional. Get a certain point of view on a subject.
Google will value this much more than the number of backlinks you asked from another bloggers.

#2

And actually Google improved their algorithm a lot – ever noticed that the articles that make it into the top now often contain real answers and real knowledge and less useless SEO-talk? It was much worse several years ago.
Also Google’s top gives a lot of results from quora/stackoverflow and forums – and I guess it well may be that it was a deliberate decision on the Google’s side, not just the result of the work of the algorithm.
But yeah, it still has a long way to go with niche requests that can yield complete BS, fact-checking and general conciseness-promotion. But it’s getting better by the year (not defending Google here)

#3

This is interesting. Perhaps a poll can give us more answers. Let’s what do people think about this. Who knows: maybe I’m just unlucky or biased.

  • Google works awesome :smile:
  • Google improves day by day, I see the improvements! :+1:
  • Google could be better :thinking:
  • Google regularly gives me bad search results :sleepy:
  • Google always fails to give proper answers :grimacing:

0 voters

#4

Alex, you said you search directly on Stackoverflow. But you know, I search in Google and get to Stackoverflow :)

Well, in my opinion the quality of SERP becomes better from year to year.

We should distinguish different types of search queries.

  1. When someone asks for some service, they’ll definitely get companies which provides the services. But the tendency is that there are more and more ads, which in my opinion is not that bad for this kind of queries. If I search for food delivery, I’m not interested in articles, I’m interested in service.

  2. Information queries. Here is the thing when you say Google sucks. Personally I often get links from stackoverflow or wikipedia, but it depends. If I search a subject “Second world war”, I’ll get wikipedia which is fine as a start of researching. If I google something like “Repairing fridge”, yes, here it comes: SEO articles. But, looks like the articles which really helps people gets to the top. Don’t forget that google analyzes user behaviour: if user closes the page quickly, then it’s a bad page, user haven’t found an answer.

  3. I forgot the third type of queries :smiley:

So in my opinion we’ll have more sites which are OVERALL good (wipikedia), not exactly one page. If we google services we get them.

The search engines btw will improve their quality. Remember in 2000th, it’d enough to put keywords in a page dozen times and you’re on top. Now it doesn’t work that way.

#5

It is an endless war :smile:
Google invents new algorithms, SEO folks try to cheat them.

Now I have to read x10 more content and do the “click here to continue reading” just to make Google think I’m naturally engaged with the content.
I know Google is smart and its scripts are constantly learning. But in this battle, a man who desires money will always win.

#6

What I don’t like is the monopoly Google has on that. And yet I don’t use DuckDuckGo or similar products, which I see are getting more attention and lately and that perhaps even compare similar-to-google experience today? Does anyone use some other search engine?

#7

Yeah, a monopoly is something I dislike too. I never tried DuckDuckGo but after your post, I will set it up as a default search engine and try to use it for a week. Let’s see how it will go!

#8

Remember aport.ru? :) My first search engine

#9

I’m not that old :sweat_smile: