Is SEO on its way out?

@Fortune Palace 163192 wrote:

If ALL, what does he think is going to replace it?

Qualitative content is all that matters and modern search engines are starting to pick up ton that. I can not wait for the day when all the poor Playtech casinos are gone from the top positions in various SEs! :drink:

Does he mean blackhat SEO is on its way out (which can only be a good thing) or ALL SEO? If ALL, what does he think is going to replace it?

@Tarzan 163207 wrote:

I disagree completely.

If you have two sites that are identical then the site that is optimized the best for a search engine to view/spider it will be on top.

At the moment.

But it’s only a matter of time before the SE’s work out how to credit the original content owner. In fact there are many ways they could decide the order of presentation – country hosted, target audience, the order they are found, how users react to a site…many, many ways. At the moment, algos are in their infancy so they choose to factor in optimisation heavily. In years to come, they will change that as the algos improve and get closer to “human” capability.

Logically, SEO does not guarantee the best results are presented to the user. It guarantees the best optimised results are presented to the user. It can be gamed. That’s why you can buy your way to the top and that’s why the top SERPS often have so many crappy sites in them.

@Tarzan 163207 wrote:

As long as its math calculating the results, SEO will be here to stay.

I agree, I think onpage seo will always help, its the link buying and other things that will eventually not be part of the equation when ranking sites. Even if we get to the point where search engines are relying on quality content to rank websites, I think optimizing those pages with good title tags and what not will still be part of the game.

I disagree completely.

If you have two sites that are identical then the site that is optimized the best for a search engine to view/spider it will be on top. How can this ever not be true?

The only way for SEO to go away is to have massive teams of humans.

As long as its math calculating the results, SEO will be here to stay.

Tribun’s right.

SEO has always been on the way out since it started. The search engines are (well, should be) constantly working towards a solution that delivers what the user wants, and that’s quality content that satisfies their query. As discussed in another recent thread, it’s only a matter of time, but “time” could be years.

As far as title tags etc to describe what a page is about, I think these are still useful and google will still be looking at these for a long time to come. Things like keyword density seem to be less and less important as time goes by, though

However, I think the algorithms will get better and better at picking up on spam and many of the other techniques that the blackhatters use. I’ve noticed far fewer utter spam pages getting to the top of the rankings, although there are still many poor quality banner pages out there getting to the top, with very little content. That may be changing too.

I was reading one of the google patents on ‘scoring traffic associated with a document’ and it seems they certainly go to great lengths to detect spam. Now, that was written in November 2006, so it will be very interesting to compare it to any more patents they produce on the subject.

One of the websites I’ve bought in the past had some shout box feature. Had to remove it after 1 day because some idiots like that kept spamming it with links after it was posted on a blackhat SEO website. People like that are the bane of the intarweb

I suggest you keep it just that an acquaintance, those guys are sneaky.

I would agree that the BLACKHAT methods of old are going, going, gone.

That doesn’t mean SEO is gone.