The Future of SEO and Google: How Will We Exist 5 Years from Now?
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I’ve already done a post on the future of blackhat seo specifically, but thought I’d put this into a more general stance. Apparently I have a thing for predictions this week. (Affiliate marketers, I know I’ve been neglecting you lately, I’ll make my next entry about that).
Introduction
Before I get criticized here, I’m going to make one thing clear. I do not see SEO going anywhere. But I see it’s complexity and emphasis on the basic search results going down. There’s simply no way to ensure something will be ranking years from now in my mind. I see SEOs and the big G having more or less a mini war going on. They’ve set the stage for that. The latest debate over the policing of linkbait was a “in” for Google. It was a somewhat reasonable instance where they could introduce the concept of further policing that allows for a lot of expansion later down the road.
Where are We Today?
SEO is in a state of flux right now. Google is pushing their limits in controlling the efforts of SEO. The SEO in turn, is pushing the limits of the Google Webmaster guidelines. I remember when I first came to sphinn in October, mentioning anything grayhat or blackhat was a sure way to never top out 5 votes. Nowadays? Creative grayhat SEO is one of the easier ways to hit the front page(aside from the top 10 ways Twitter can cure cancer). While granted that’s an odd measurement, I feel that it’s a decent indicator of the mindset of SEOs change. Beyond that, I’ve been pretty consistently contacted by mainstream (and respected) SEOs that are asking me questions and such tending much more towards the gray area than I ever thought they would.
Thus far, I can’t think of a single truly “whitehat” mainstream SEO that I’ve met. Sure, some will have 100% whitehat projects. Things that are easy to linkbait, etc. But with the exception of Doug Heil(a character to be sure; we’ve had some interesting exchanges on this blog) I’ve never seen someone shy away from paid links in a competitive market. Beyond that, without a touch of Gray, I see few ways to truly be successful in today’s marketplace(Sorry Doug).
So anyways, back to the future. I think there’s a few potential paths that Google and SEOs could take. Either way though, I feel it’s going to be very much a “Us vs. Them” mindset, compared to the cooperative existence that has been around up until then.
Where Will We Be? General Predictions. - These are a few possibilities for where we’ll be in 5 years.
- Google Will Have a Large Enough Dataset to Make SEO’s Lives Hell - Everytime someone reports a site for paid links, Google kills a kitten. No, seriously. Google has some severe weaknesses. But they also have some incredible strengths. Their primary strength is data and pattern analysis. People are constantly reporting sites in niches where they themselves are trying to succeed, and are using the very same tactics they’re reporting someone for. If people keep doing this for 5 years, Google is going to have enough data on sites selling links to nail people left and right. Whether you’re ok with this or not, it’s up to you.
- Rankings are Going to be Less Important - I know I know, someone out there just spat out a sip of coffee when I said this. But here’s the facts. Google is slowly eliminating the importance of the SERPs in as many markets as possible to leverage their own products. Things like having “Google Base” product results automatically appear at the top for many products, or having in some cases 10+ local map results appear above the search results are going to absolutely increase. It’s a great move for their business model. The only way to get above the map results(definitely a click killer) is to…..pay for a PPC listing.
Now, SEOs are not PPC experts(largely).
So what’s an SEO to do? Promote specifically to get Google base or local listings up there. Gaming them? Possibly. Whatever it takes to compete. But I see the number of niches affected by these Google related chart toppers increasing exponentially in the next few years. Especially as Google Checkout and Knol expand. - Massive Increase in Link Farms
So. Since paid links are now risky, link spam is getting ever riskier(curse you forum admins), link farms are going to make a huge come back. The stage is set. IPs and hosting are cheaper than ever before. Parasite hosting has reached epic proportions.
By using a tiered set of sites within the same niches(the lowest sites get the spammiest links, the ones at the top get the contextual links from those sites) you can have a much less “reportable” site. Beyond that, it’s easier to linkbait off a fresh domain, drop yourself a contextual link, and move on to the next domain and linkbait (especially with Digg hating commercial domains)
Where Will Google be in 5 Years?
- Matt Cutts will Change Jobs, Hilarity will Ensue - Matt Cutts right now represents the connection between SEOs and Google. I’m convinced places like DigitalPoint actually qualify as having a “Cult of the Personality” for him. But either way, if he retires, he cannot be replaced truly. And with him will go the connection webmasters has to Google. With that goes their ability to get clarifications on the constantly increasing list of rules. With that goes a lot of the fanboy loyalty that so many have towards Google. With that goes a lot of the “ethical” BS that far too many $20 indian seo firms spout off about.
- Google Will Create a More Self Contained Internet - I’ve talked before about how Google is creating their own self contained internet. They are going to use the information we’ve been so eagerly forking over to them to make the SERPs less valuable, and create their own little Google utopia web. So many niches are impossible to rank for 100% whitehat nowadays(Credit Cards, Home loans, etc), and I think they realize they kill off the top ranking grayhats only to allow other grayhats using the same tactics below them to rank. So how does one combat this eternal ranking clusterfuck? The GoogleWeb.
- Google Will Get Sued for their Double Standards. And Lose. - Google has been sued before for everything from deindexing a site to caching data they never were given permission to cache. But I think the double standards they’ve been embracing will eventually catch up with them. If you ever want a bit of fun, search for “west bloomfield dating” and watch the doorway pages dance. These sites get away with so much more than a less established site could ever hope to. Combine that with YouTube cloaking, the New York Times being allowed to cloak, and a variety of other such offenses, and you have some very anti-competitive practices.
- Google Will be Disemboweled While Attempting to Embrace Web2.0 - Personalized search and voting algorithms work on some sites for one reason only. There is not a large enough incentive to destroy them. Digg traffic for instance, is borderline worthless. But if Google embraces this type of system, they are going to be demolished. There’s HUGE financial incentive, and prices for Google “accounts” is down to $30 per 1000 of them. You do the math on that one. Ask tried something similar with their original algorithm (ranking based on the clicks to each result) and it was spammed into uselessness. In everyone’s digg/social/twitter fervor, they seem to forget how easily systems like this are gamed.
- Google Will Start to See Employees Being “Purchased” - I know I’ve wanted a Google engineer or manual reviewer on my side before. The blackmarket for the information those guys have is going to become tremendous, and I suspect more than one will be enticed into breaking their non-disclosure agreement. The cash incentives are just too high to say no.
- Google Will Finally See some Scalability Problems - Thus far Google has managed to be able to handle all the manual reviewing of websites, reinclusion requests, and spam reports with it’s ever growing staff. But that’s because the company has seen massive growth pretty much since it’s inception. But right now, they control SO much of the online advertising market(where they get their revenue) that they’re going to find it difficult to expand. With lower adsense payouts there’s less incentive to use adsense, so a new site may not necessarily mean more revenue for the company. And the internet is going to be expanding faster than they themselves can(since they already control so much). I think it’s going to be terribly difficult to effectively scale their human employees.
Conclusion
I know many of these points will be left with friction. And perhaps some old schoolers out there will disagree with me. Who knows, I may be wrong. But I keep seeing more and more common tactics that were typically whitehat/ignored being destroyed. Paid links penalties, directories being worthless, too many blog comments? It’s spam. Too many social links? Better take a look at those profiles submission habits. And policing linkbait is clearly being opened up for further examination by Google.
Let me ask you something. Supposing the story on Money.co.uk was true, do you think Google would want them ranking for Credit Cards because of that? No. They wouldn’t. Because it wouldn’t be ranking because it was a wealth of information about “credit cards”. It would rank because of the individual story. And that’s the kind of examination I think we have to be prepared for in the future.
I’ll be honest. I’m a bit nervous publishing this entry. I’ve said some ballsy things, and I’m 20. There’s people out there that have been doing this when I was playing Pokemon in a elementary school cafeteria, and that greatly limits the timespan I’m able to take my observations from.
But hey. I’m definitely open to discussion on this one, and I’d love to hear what everyone out there has to say whether you have more experience than me or not.
May 29th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Nice take on the scenario dude, there’s a lot of shiftyness going on at the goog if you ask me - those datasets you discuss I would wholeheartedly say exist, although I wreckon they are probably a few years in the making.
The final nail in the coffin would be if google somehow *bare with me - fleshing this out as I type* got a foot hold in the ISP market - think about google + all the records of uploads/downloads and what people are actively doing (if they don’t already buy that from the ISP’s themselves.)
But perhaps thats a bit big brother like - I mean google doesnt have many other big brother tendancies? lol.
My take is that the black end of the scale will move more towards the dark, illimenating the grey areas has got to be a google ideal, although this ultimately leads to a cleaner distinction I am SURE the darker end of the scale will always exist and prosper of the 800lb gorrilla - nature of the beast!
Don’t think we should worry about age - not until google gets access to birth certificates and somehow links that to our online operations!!
May 29th, 2008 at 10:58 am
I think we’ll see a greater push toward the semantic breakdown of webpages.
I have said before that Google puts way too much emphasis on anchor text. I like the idea that quality of links pointing to a page will influence its ranking, but I think that they have to fix this ‘anchor text’ bullsh*t.
The way, I think, they will do this is by using technology such as that being developed by the university of Washington (videos, text runner) to better understand what a page is about, and get away from anchor text.
Search engines will one day be able to analyze the content of sentences on pages, and that will play a major factor in how they rank pages their future.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:09 am
a while back someone accused doug on sugarrae’s blog comments of buying links…it was that post that he threatened to sue her over if she didn’t edit comments.
i remember this because the guy doing the calling out was also named corey, and if i disagree with doug now he assumes i am that other corey and throws a fit and insults at me.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Your predictions are well thought out and make a lot of sense.
As far as white hat SEO goes, “pearl gray” is the new white.
Although my goal is still to rank sites on Google’s first page, a lot of my work now goes into getting traffic by other means. It’s slower and more expensive, but not affected by every algorithm changes that’s implemented. It also tends to convert well.
No one cares how old you are, and we like the fact that you have the cajones to say what you do - keep up the awesome posts!
May 29th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
You’ve got a lot of maturity for someone your age Mike. That, and a great deal of humility and respect for those that have been in this industry much longer than either of us.
That said, I concur with a lot of the predictions you’ve made here. The one that resonates with me the most, is the gaming of personal search - and that makes for an even dirtier market than paid links. For the sake of this industry, I hope we can all sufficiently make our living, and those of our clients, by employing “ethical” marketing strategies.
If not, we’re all going to have to employ a bizarre version of artificial and natural promotion so distorted, that even Google would not be able to trace back the origin or intent of such tactics.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Excellent read and I agree with the majority of it. I see a time coming when chaos will ensue and there will be some major backlash for the Googleborg.
(I’m back in action by the way. Two months of work but I actually got back in)
May 29th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Great post and I agree with a lot of what you said. What interested me was your point about Matt Cutts and his strong relationship with the SEO community. I’ve never really thought about that, but he plays a vital role in PR doesn’t he.
May 29th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Shady;
Your future predictions sound a bit glum - perhaps you are considering a different line of work post graduation? Maybe writing some artificial intelligence algorithms?
The industries that are known as unethical and spammy on the net are actually worse offline - think booze, gambling, dating, and almost as bad employment, real estate, finance, publishing, and insurance.
It’s not Google’s job to try to reform other industries, just to get as much money from them as they can through Ad Cents.
I think all the well known social services and most blog search services have already been hopelessly gamed and are only good for entertainment value. And Google search will probably go the same way.
I’m really not looking forward to flipping through 15 or 20 pages of spammy pages and paid ads to find a single content or review page on something I’m interested in. And I think AI can develop fast enough to prevent that.
May 29th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
@ArtDeco: Quite on the contrary. Odd as it sounds, I’m excited. The bane of my existence since I began doing online marketing is fighting off firmly embedded competition. The changing landscape means that it’s no longer about who had the foresight and cash reserves to buy $80k worth of links 6 years ago. It’s instead about who can quickly adapt to these changes and use them to their advantage.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
If I may be so bold with this one small point, I think your correct, but only to an extent. I only say this because I believe that there is a missed point in your post about Google’s future…
One bit about the bigger picture omitted is Google’s Web History.
- Have I predominantly followed links for financial information/advice in the last several days?
- If yes, dont show the Money.co.uk result, instead provide higher ranking financial (credit card) results
- If no, have I been searching/following more humorous links?
- If yes, blend in the Money.co.uk result in the SERP’s, even though I’m searching for the term “credit cards”
It absolutely floors me how many people I observe, and personally speak with, who stay permanently logged into Google no matter what they are doing on that system (brilliant baiting with services such as gmail,docs,igoogle,et al).
How many new data centers are they creating, or capitalizing upon, near cheap Hydro-electric power plants? Dont they already have multiple copies of the internet? Why are they expanding
At any rate, just one more opinion lumped onto the pile I suppose
Another interesting post from yea, thx!
May 30th, 2008 at 2:43 am
“2.Google Will Create a More Self Contained Internet”
I think they will go about this in a very smart way so they don’t repeat the mistakes that AOL made. AOL died because people got sick of being trapped inside the AOL wall. Google can create a self-contained Internet without people realizing that is self-contained. They can do this by having people leave Google to go to other sites owned by Google, like Youtube, Knol. It will accomplish the same thing, and people will feel like they aren’t trapped inside a google society, even though they are. Very crafty on their part.
It will basically be like the book 1984. Countries (websites) that appear to be competing against each other are on the same team. If Google wants to go about things in a genius way, they will focus on creating an Oceania, and not so much on keeping people inside a visible Google umbrella.
May 30th, 2008 at 7:21 am
Very good article, I’m impressed! I agree with most of it and I can only hope that SEO will go the right way:)
May 30th, 2008 at 7:57 am
“aside from the top 10 ways Twitter can cure cancer”
QFT!
May 30th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Dude stop mentioning your age. I doubt anyone here ever guessed your were that young or care. Good content is good content.
Also, maybe you should zoom out once more and look at things beyond the internet and connect what is going on in society to what is happening online.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:29 am
As you’ve noted in your previous posts, if you’re a white hat you HAVE to do shady stuff even just for research purposes.
I think there’s a new breed of white hat coming in the future. More specifically, black hat and white hat are getting a bit more intermingled. Not creating grey hats either - let’s call it a sheep’s hat because they’re wolves in sheeps clothing.
The sheep hat doesn’t just act so stealthily that they look completely white hat - they act so stealthily that it’s not even apparent they are doing SEO.
Frankly, that’s where I’m trying to move towards. I want my sites to get top rankings, but if someone does a hand check of my site all they see is some stupid joe’s website. SEO? :scratches head: Nope, don’t think I’ve even heard of that. What did you say it was again?
May 30th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Every system is based on a set of rules, regardless of complexity, and every rule has thresholds which will be explored so long as it is economically viable.
May your next 5 years be measured in hapiness and an ever increasing bank account.
May 30th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
[…] The Future of SEO and Google: How Will We Exist 5 Years from Now? […]
May 31st, 2008 at 2:08 am
[…] what would happen to SEO’s and Google (the relationship) five years from now? Hell yeah! Slightly shady SEO has some “calculated predctions”. Is your site social media friendly? Search Engine Land has some suggestions, for ya. Have you been […]
May 31st, 2008 at 3:32 am
Great frikin post! A lot of what i’ve been thinking lately too.
May 31st, 2008 at 4:50 am
[…] some ways, it’s easier to predict something thirty years in the future (sidenote : XMCP posted recently about SEO in 5 years). There’s a lot of room for speculation, and I can easily […]
May 31st, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Отлично прочитал и я согласен с большинством его. Я вижу ближайшие время, когда будет возникнуть хаос, и там будут некоторые крупные реакцию на Googleborg.
May 31st, 2008 at 8:59 pm
[…] post stems from something SlightlyShady mentioned in his post about “Where SEO and Google Will Be in the Next 5 Years“. (On a side note: SlightlyShady has his finger on the pulse and tends to very […]
June 1st, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Have to disagree on some of this. I don’t see how they’re going to lose a case, unless regulation happens.
If Google continues to win market share and expand into every market, they’re gonna get regulated and broken down into independent business units, like Bell (though Bell is again consolidating with cell phone, satellite tv, landline, and internet services all under one roof…). Alternately, it might get nationalized so the government controls the flow of information, rather than a private entity. At least there, citizens vote for who’s at the top.
June 1st, 2008 at 3:26 pm
@Gab: I definitely see your point. However, especially for publically traded companies the government frequently DOES get involved. Particularily regarding anti-competitive business practices carried out by a monopoly(which Google is fast becoming)
Also remember how many countries Google does business in. Even if the US doesn’t do anything, any one of those potentially could.
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:10 am
Very interesting…i dont want to see google dominate forever…i want something fresh and new…more social media…i want the people using the internet, to control it.
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:23 am
Although this article is written in an informative way, most of it is plain speculation..no prove nore any solid arguments..
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:37 am
@edwin: It is speculation. That is the nature of prediction.
Most of my predictions are backed up by what I believe is the natural response to Google tightening the leash it has around the web, and a logical continuation of the tactics and changes they’ve gone through so far.
June 21st, 2008 at 1:02 am
Google, Its a sound a baby makes, but when this baby googles, it shits the golden egg. It will end up being an elitist organization for people who have fast computer and fast cars.MONEY.root of evil
The road to hell is paved with googally intentions. Shove it up yer google and smoke it.
July 1st, 2008 at 8:01 pm
What about all this talk about the end of net neutrality? Do you think it’s a legitimate threat or is it just a scare tactic that’s being used to get attention online?
July 5th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I predict total commercialization. I forsee Google having poor results and not hurting because of it.
Aggressive link building and finding “loopholes” will be necessary to stay competitive.
I do predict an end to quality search as we know it, and I also believe there will be a quality search engine which however is going to charge a monthly fee (probably a small one) for those who want to get the old Google experience back!
July 21st, 2008 at 6:11 am
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July 22nd, 2008 at 2:38 pm
“I predict total commercialization. I forsee Google having poor results and not hurting because of it.”
Disagree, if their results really do become too poor, and the average user (that 80% who uses IE bunch) starts to notice and care that WILL be a problem. Because then all you need is for someone to come along with traditional advertising like TV and say, “Do you think Google results suck now? Use us instead.”
As long as this company isn’t Microsoft people would switch (in the scenario you laid out). There’s no brand loyalty in search. None at all. If there was, Yahoo wouldn’t be hanging by a thread.
August 20th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I see rampant commercialisation of the Internet in general. A huge number of quality websites will make contemporary search engines useless at finding 10 good relevant sites. Websites in general will become more sophisticated and will (hopefully) stay free from excess code and lumpen useless features. SEO will become less about links etc and your overall position will be based on the design/usability/content of your site regardless of links. I see Google gradually factoring out any benefits SEOs can add. Think about it, Google doesn’t want SEO’d sites, it likes well designed sites with good content, by removing the influence of SEO it gets to measure on quality more.
That’s my 2p.
September 14th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
[…] post stems from something SlightlyShady mentioned in his post about Where SEO and Google Will Be in the Next 5 Years“. (On a side note: SlightlyShady has his finger on the pulse and tends to very […]
September 17th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
You are a moron, no one from Google would join a con man promoting criminal activity, you and Shawn Hogan should hook up or John Scott.