SEO Must Change, and So Must Google

by Waqar Ali Shah

Search Engine Optimization is a curious term. At once, it can evoke a variety of notions, ranging from global perception management to crafty search engine manipulation. It may be appropriate to state here that almost all SEO today is straddling the boundaries of white, black and gray hat.

The term Search Engine Optimization appears to convey that SEO is about developing or managing a website’s evolution in order to make it fully realize its potential, or to make it accomplish the goal of being able to provide relevant content about its specific domain or niche, and as a corollary rank high in the relevant SERPS. The word “optimization” would have us believe that it’s really about tweaking a website to perform at an “optimal” level. This imparts an air of benignness to a field, which we shall now see, isn’t as innocuous or transparent as it may seem. Notwithstanding purely black hat techniques, even s0-called white hat SEO attempts to alter global website perception in a way that is not congruent with the wider objectives of achieving search engine results relevance.

Take link-building for example. Google calculates PageRank based on incoming links, and a higher PageRank almost always translates into better rankings for the more competitive keywords. All SEOs agree that inbound links are a major contributor to increased rankings in Google. However, these same SEOs invest time and money, which includes paying other webmasters, to create backlinks. This involvement of money betrays the fact that incoming links to a website aren’t really “votes” at all, but votes solicited through “bribes”.

Consider link building campaigns. It would be great if you could persuade owners of relevant, related websites to link to your site to actually provide real value to the end user experience. However, most link building campaigns involve outsourcing the work to a specialized party that aims to get a whole lot of links by hook or by crook. Submissions to directories are perfectly legitimate, however. But sneaking links into unsuspecting websites such as comment-enabled blogs or wikis is not. And from Google’s perspective, neither is paying someone to link to a website. If an incoming link is a vote, as Google would have us believe, then by all means, paying to get votes is an unethical practice. This can be called artificial link building, or to put it bluntly, bribing. Link building practices, then, are really skewing the cherished ideal of the highly relevant search experience.

What is Google really doing to combat artificial link building, especially sneaky campaigns executed over a longer period of time in order to appear natural or organic? Google seems to be at a loss as to how best to combat this widespread, growing practice. If link votes can be manipulated by link-building campaigns that can pretty much guarantee you links(or votes, depending on how you perceive it) in return for money, then PageRank cannot be an effective indicator of relevance based on links/votes.

Then we have self-proclaimed SEOs openly advocating search engine manipulation by offering spammy automatic content generation tools that can guarantee you tens of thousands of pages. For example, we have bluehatseo.com offering ways to rapidly set up huge websites based on largely nonsensical content that will inevitably attract a lot of irrelevant traffic. Whether or not this is ethical is debatable, but what is obvious is that search engines must catch up with these devious promoters of irrelevant content that are swamping cyberspace.

There is something hugely disturbing about the fact that major search engines such as Google continue to be so easily manipulated by deft webmasters. In a recent case study I happened to come across, a mortgage solutions website generated nearly 15 million backlinks using link exchanges masquerading as permanent links. The website continues to occupy the top rank for extremely competitive keywords in what is clearly a bewildering example of black hat SEO tolerated well by Google.

Something about SEO has to change, and fast, for it to truly become a reflection of website relevance. Search engines such as Google must modify their algorithms to mitigate the effects of manipulative practices such as automatic content creation and sustained, paid artificial link building (not just rapid link building as is currently being dealt with). This must be done, even if it involves drastically changing Google’s existing algorithms - including PageRank - or replacing them altogether.