SEO is Something We’d all Rather Live Without, Like Accountants on Tax Day
I like my accountant. He’s a really nice and honest man, but the truth is, I’d rather live without him (professionally). Why? Because the necessity of his service is something that I resent. The tax system in our country is broken. It’s absurdly complicated, like a remote control designed by engineers (Incidentally, we should hire Steve Jobs to redesign our tax code). When you have something that’s absurdly complicated, you need to hire an expert to help you.
The tax code is a perfect allegory to SEO. For those of you who don’t know, SEO means “search engine optimization.” It’s an area of expertise that you can probably pick up yourself, if you want to spend a few days researching on the internet. It’s also an area rich with snake oil (just join Twitter, you’ll see, 75% of Twitter users are SEO “experts” for hire). It’s also an area where huge, legitimate businesses have apparently found a market.
An SEO company, Conductor, just raised $10 million for SEO services. Companies apparently hire them to get their websites to show up high in Google searches. But the very necessity for SEO exposes how awful modern search technology is. The problem is largely that “modern” means “10 years old” when it comes to search technology.
Google had a problem 15 years ago. When someone typed in “coleslaw recipe,” 5,000 pages would come back. Google had to decide which of those 5,000 pages was the most relevant to the phrase “coleslaw recipe.” So Google came up with a heuristic that took into account the words on the page, the keywords, and the links back to the page from other pages. And immediately, the legions of clever interlopers figured out how to fake out Google by studying what their competition’s pages looked like, and by planting fake links all over the internet.
Fast forward to 2009, and nothing has changed, except now “coleslaw recipe” comes back with millions of hits. So companies like Concord can earn their living charging nice people like you to make your web site appear high on Google’s results list when someone searches for coleslaw recipes. It feels like extortion, doesn’t it? It’s not evil, it’s just bad. The Google paradigm is bad. It’s really bad. It’s the exact same thing as the tax code. It’s an awful paradigm. Because it’s arbitrary and complicated, and we are all forced to hire an SEO expert to make it work for us.
The time is ripe for someone to come and smash the entire Google paradigm, putting Concord and every other SEO expert out of business. It doesn’t seem like it should be that complicated. And it’s probably not. Like all industries, once a player or two dominates, the innovation stops (GM, I’m looking at you), and we all just sort of accept that this is how things are supposed to work. Google stopped trying to change their paradigm a long time ago because absent a new one, they have a license to print money. But this also leaves them incredibly vulnerable.
I look forward to someone coming along and killing the SEO industry. If they kill Google along the way, I’d be ok with that too. I just want to make some coleslaw, it shouldn’t be that complicated.
Andrew says:
April 29th, 2009
9:36 am
You have just described the same issue people should have with any type of service industry though? I resent having to pay a mechanic to fix my car when, if I really wanted to, I could learn how to fix what is wrong and do it myself. You pay for the convenience of not having to use your own time to do these things.
Have you ever paid a painter to paint your walls? A builder to build your home?! We’d all rather live without paying anyone for a service but then how would you make money to live your own life?
What a stupid blog post. All you have done is either admit that you are lazy and won’t do it yourself because it would take the time to learn (in which case why are you even complaining?), or just having a moan because you feel you needed to, which is it?
kapauldo says:
April 29th, 2009
9:49 am
I want someone to fix the tax code because the expertise is an artificial and arbitrary (although necessary) one, just as SEO is. If they fixed search, we wouldn’t need to hire experts who know how to play the system.
Brian Bradley, Content Editor says:
April 29th, 2009
1:20 pm
The Emperor (search-engine paradigms and “optimization”) is wearing no clothes, and people are beginning to notice.
Searchers who submit an undifferentiated phrase (e.g., “cole slaw recipe”) to a search engine opt-in to the current paradigm and receive the targeted, hyped, and manipulated results that the paradigm produces. Web users must invest a little time to learn and use structured search techniques that produce more useful results.
Publishers must embrace “organic SEO” by providing rich, well-written, semantically correct content that lends itself to being selected by structured queries submitted by savvy searchers.
Let lazy searchers and SEO “experts” have at their game. Neither are asking for much — and both are getting exactly that.
Brian Bradley, Content Editor
DishiWiki.com
kapauldo says:
April 29th, 2009
1:34 pm
“The Emperor” analogy is dead on. But how can publishers embrace “organic SEO” with all the SEO experts gaming the system? The paradigm needs smashing, don’t you think? I mean, you’re right about “lazy searchers,” but I’m a lazy searcher and searching should be organic too. Organic just means game-proof. But, other than that, I totally agree with your point.
HushDaddy says:
April 29th, 2009
9:12 pm
funny, i just typed “cole slaw” into google and the weirdest thing happened. the first result that came up gave me 11 recipes for cole slaw!
if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. google still continues to provide the most relevant search results. if you didn’t have the ability to search for “cole slaw” on google where would you have gotten your information from?
library cards are out Kapauldo…
kapauldo says:
April 30th, 2009
5:28 am
hushdaddy- your point is valid. but, i’m not claiming that google doesn’t work, only that the paradigm requires SEO. and the fact that it requires SEO is what i am annoyed by because it means google is completely gameable and that the gaming experts, not the cole slaw experts win.
Andrew says:
May 1st, 2009
7:16 am
The paradigm you describe is no different to either of those I gave in my initial example though. Getting my car fixed still “requires” a mechanic (unless I learn and find the time to do it myself - same goes for SEO).
I am annoyed I have to pay my taxes, the paradigm “requires” that I pay them though for the continued governance of my country, grah! Once again the system has been gamed by gaming experts!
Seriously, this is a tired and silly argument that has been directed at numerous industries by individuals frustrated by their own laziness and lack of results/capabilities.
kapauldo says:
May 1st, 2009
11:07 am
I agree that the tax paradigm is the same, but not the mechanic. A tax system does not, by it’s nature, *have* to be so complex as to require an expert. It could be very simple. It could be something like “enter your gross income here” and “here’s what you owe.” It could be done on a website, it could take 30 seconds. But instead, it’s a giant boondoggle, so an expert is required. But that expertise is artificial, because it’s not an inherently complex idea. The implementation is just bad so as to require an expert.
Same for search. It doesn’t *have* to be so complex as to require an expert, someone could come along and make an SEO-proof search paradigm. SEO is just gaming, so the system is flawed because it’s game-able.
Google has no incentive to do that because they’re making a lot of money, but the necessity for an expert is not inherent to the problem space. A car, on the other hand, is an inherently complex system that requires an expert, much like the body requires a doctor. You can’t avoid hiring someone to fix your transmission, or at least most of us can’t.
If someone can come up with a game-proof search paradigm that caters to us lazy people, they’ll be rich, and all of the lazy and non-lazy searchers will benefit.