By Joshua Tyler | Updated
The origins of SEO are neither altruistic nor well-intentioned. Early SEO was used as a way to subvert search results and trick search engines into ranking crappy, unworthy fraudulent content over better things that people might actually want.
This has sparked an arms race, with legitimate publishers forced to adopt the same tactics in order to compete with dishonest scammers.
The SEO industry was then created to sell weapons to both camps.
Search engines should have saved us from SEO
If the search engines, of which Google was just one minor player among many at the time, had done their job, they could have stopped this whole thing right then and there. SEO should never have been necessary if they were doing what they were supposed to do.
Search engines should have been the ones fighting these spammers, but they didn’t do a good job, forcing legitimate publishers to buy SEO weapons so they could take matters into their own hands.
Whether these early search engines failed through incompetence or design is anyone’s guess, but ultimately it was the inability of search engines to distinguish good content from bad that allowed the SEO industry to prosper.
SEO Sells Weapons to Both Sides
However, SEO was never about helping the good guys. They need the bad guys to succeed, otherwise there would be no reason for the good guys to hire them. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the SEO industry is as much of a scam as the scammers it claims to help legitimate publishers fight against. If these scammers were ever defeated, the SEO industry would cease to exist.
Google has now made a decision to make the SEO industry irrelevant. Unfortunately, this is not a move that helps the people the SEO industry preys on. Instead, Google abandoned the idea of being a search engine and shifted its business model to one that appears to rank content largely based on who its most important business partners are.
Google’s decision to wipe out the SEO industry
I recently attended Google’s Creator Conversation event, where they perhaps accidentally revealed that this was their intention.
Another participant asked Google engineers a simple question. I changed the names to protect the innocent, but in essence it was this.
Why does Nike rank #1 for the query “Best Running Shoes” instead of a list written by an independent, unbiased reviewer?
We expected the response to be something like, “Oh, we’re working on it.” Our algorithm just didn’t understand it. Instead, the answer we got was:
If we rank a small publisher before a big brand, won’t they get upset?
Based on this response, Google’s main concern seems to be ordering results to please powerful companies.
In this environment, SEO ceases to have value for small publishers. No amount of SEO can make your website a powerful business.
Twenty independent publishers participated in Google’s Creator Conversation event. Nineteen of them spent between $10,000 and $50,000 each, hiring the most well-known and respected SEO consultants on the Internet to help them solve their problems. None of them had positive results, although Google confirmed that all of these sites were good and had no real problems.
If SEO consultants can’t help sites, which Google already loves, what hope is there that they can help anyone else? None.
Why SEO professionals must continue to protect Google, even if it destroys them
This is why you’ll see SEO professionals defending Google against accusations that they favor big brands. They need to protect the world’s largest search engine, because if people realize the truth, they no longer have a business model.
If there is a future for SEO, it will probably work for these big companies and try to help them find an edge to outperform other big companies. If you’re Reebok and you want to outperform Nike, perhaps there is some level of SEO that could help you get there.
The rest of the SEO industry has been relegated to the bottom, praying for the innocent and the elderly after Google’s recent moves. Their only customer base now consists of people who don’t know any better. Maybe that’s what it was all along.