Ask HN: Is there demand for a completely new kind of SEO? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there demand for a completely new kind of SEO?

5 pointsfranze8 comments

I'm an SEO. Yeah.. I know.... I too believe that SEO is a bullsht industry. The thing is: I despise SEO as it is currently applied to the online world, but I'm pretty good at it. So what to do: Start a company, disrupt the field (completely).

SEO is a mixture a marketing, biz dev, product development and technology (that's the cool part) - glued together by esoteric concepts (trust, link juice, ...) and a shtload of magic numbers (pagerank, ranking, mozrank,...). That's the awful part.

These esoteric, unquantifiable concepts together with magic, nontransparent, incoherent, foggy numbers lead to a state where everyone can advocate -in a seemingly logic way- the bad decisions he or she wants to make.

There are some companies out there which promised to solve these issues, but instead just delivered more and more magic numbers.

I want to get rid of it all. Instead of idiotic concepts i want the SEO world to work with hard, cold data and trends based on that data, instead of magic numbers we should create and work with traceable, comparable figures.

Oh, and I'm not targeting the goody two shoes companies out there which want to keyword optimize their title tags, but with companies which already mastered SEO but believe there must be a next level.

Oh yeah, and everything (every code) of course open source and every process automatable/scalable.

Is there demand for that? Or is SEO good enough for your company? Or is SEO already in such a bad condition, that it would be better to let the patient die?

My guess is that someone's already doing it. I've heard rumors of ex-Googlers that are using genetic algorithms to develop SEO models, which then automatically adjust whenever Google changes their ranking algorithm. There's a well-defined fitness function - your site's Google ranking in a basket of common queries - and a limited number of dimensions to generate mutations, so it seems well suited to that approach.

yeah, there are quite some companies which try to automate one or more aspects of SEO. but in doing so they create - their own, proprietary - magic SEO numbers. they advance (and in the long term lock-in) their client, but not SEO as a whole.

i'm talking more of a wordpress for seo approach.

The big catch is that some of the signals are abstract and built on non-public data. And as Google puts more weight on things aligned with "brand" you can know that they are doing so, but that still doesn't solve the problem of needing to build brand.

IMHO we are starting to move to the point of SEO where we are moving away from knowing the data to understanding deeper marketing functions that create the relevancy signals as a side effect. If you have a higher visitor value than your competition and can afford to buy more ads than any competitor can then reinvesting those profits at some point creates a winner take most market segment where you get a lot of the relevancy signals built as a free side effect of buying tons of ads.

SEO is shifting to Social SEO.

Essentially what you like on facebook, tweet or with a +1 button will become the higher ranked content.

Link building is a dying concept

Social gives us what we want, great content rising to the top. It is the future. Develop great content and engage with your followers and network.

Traffic will follow.

It is worth noting that both Twitter and Facebook have worked to turn their "relevancy" signals into what amounts to ad units. The signal available there basically represents things along the lines of either viral humor pieces, large brand ads, or both.

It is further worth noting that when HP researchers looked at viral Tweets that they generally represented an echo of content from sources which were already popular and already had strong distribution channels outside of Twitter. http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Data-Central/HP-research-shows-... So rather than finding new relevancy signals, it is mostly just re-highlighting/hyping/amplifying that which is already popular. Add into the pay-to-play models where the relevancy signals are basically also sold as ad units and I am not very convinced that these aid true relevancy.

Rather they might just highlight the business operations which already have plenty of relevancy signals, those doing off topic viral humor pieces, and those who have large ad budgets to blow through while trying to claim how innovative their marketing approach is.

All the above said, the ability to monetize the "relevancy" signal will cause some search engines to want to lean on it, because ultimately if they can monetize the relevancy signals that allows them to monetize the organic search results as well, while claiming the results are "organic." I don't expect Google to want to put a lot of weight on Facebook likes (doing so would subsidize a directly competing ad network) but I would expect Google to put significant weight on +1 clicks at some point.

I think a lot of people inside the field of SEO are trying to go broader so that if & when a particular search channel is a bit unreliable or unpredictable (look at how many sites were torched in Google's Panda update) they can still keep the business afloat through other channels (paid search, social stuff, email marketing, and so on).

I don't think you can ever really get rid of the fog in search completely though. If and when you disclose something publicly that reveals an algorithm weakness, ultimately what happens is people abuse the relevancy signal and then Google evolves their algorithm to place less weight on that relevancy signal. The other thing that happens is the cost of trying to influence that relevancy signal goes up. Some people have highlighted that in some instances domain names can be part of an SEO's strategy. Eventually that led to poker.org selling for a million Dollars!

Over time relevancy signals that are shared ultimately either become more expensive to create, less trusted, or both.

The other thing I would add is that you can know a good bit about what some of the signals are & it can still be a royal pain in the rear trying to create those signals. It is easy to write "build links" but search is a winner take most market & you can lose a lot of money marketing before you hit an inflection point. The same is true with brand building. And some brand building efforts are not entirely logical, but some are focused on exploiting the irrational parts of human nature.

If irrational humans create the relevancy signals you need and irrational idealistic humans write the algorithms that grade those signals, then just rationally looking at the numbers does not guarantee you will be able to compete. You can be 100% right and still be plenty unprofitable in many business ventures.

I also see a problem in the current shift in technology we see from websites in document form to full-features webapplications (HTML5, JS). Google is pushing this shift, too. But search robots still don't execute JS. Therefore it is not easy to develop a modern webapplication for users with good UIs and at the same time optimize for search robots.

IMHO the big picture issue here is not just the increasing complexity to develop across, but that more and more layers of media are being commoditized and owned by the search providers.

- Search engines let others build communities and filter out the noise, then scrape the reviews & replace the sources with place pages. - Expanded snippets (and review scraping) allows the search result to act as the individual product level page. Some custom vertical filters (like the Google recipes search) now allow Google to eat the category level pageview as well. Microformats encourage even more structuring of data, and as it is structured the independent sources of data become commoditized when the data is repeatedly structured in an easy way that allows search engines to displace the end data source. - Ecommerce sites submit feeds & in AdWords they can bid on a CPA basis...there are a lot of 1-word searches where Google shows me some random product ad & they are collecting all that aggregate feedback. They are not the only ones monetizing down the tail though. Search Bing for "mother's day gifts" and they have some ugly shopping promotion above their organic results. Search Yahoo! for something like "mortgage rates" and check out the ad in the organic results. - Then there are tons of other sorta attacks on the organic results in terms of verticals (books, videos, local, etc.) as well vertical ads (mortgage, credit cards, hotels prices, etc.) as well larger ad units that push the organic search results down, and finally even new search result formats which use way more whitespace to push the organic results further off the screen. - Then there are mobile applications and mobile search interfaces that further put themselves between searchers and anything "algorithmic/organic/unpaid" and the end user, replacing it with higher ad density.

SEO was a growth industry for at least a decade, but in the US now I think it is more a game of increasing competition fighting for a smaller pie.

What makes it doubly hard for smaller businesses is that with the Panda update Google directly stepped away from the pure algorithmic approach and decided to subsidize brands. Great if you are brand, but not so good if you are not. Of course, a lot of businesses do not have the scale needed to justify large investments in brand advertising. Geico can spend nearly a billion Dollars a year on ads, but whoever reads this probably can't. ;)

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