The Death of SEO

I remember reading several articles last year about the death of SEO. The main point of these was that eventually Google will perfect its algorithms and search engine results will be accurate based solely on the content, which will be the most relevant.

Well, I expect that G would be the first to admit that we are a long way, years and years probably, away from that scenario. However, G has come a long way in its fight against search engine spam, making in less easy to force your web page to the top of the rankings without a lot of inbound one way links (it is still possible to do a Google bomb, but they usually disappear pretty quickly).

The most recent buzz is about Latent Semantic Indexing which is a new algorithm that has been developed and for which Google has a patent. The summary of the invention states;

‘An information retrieval system and methodology uses phrases to index, search, rank, and describe documents in the document collection. The system is adapted to identify phrases that have sufficiently frequent and/or distinguished usage in the document collection to indicate that they are “valid” or “good” phrases. In this manner multiple word phrases, for example phrases of four, five, or more terms, can be identified. This avoids the problem of having to identify and index every possible phrases resulting from the all of the possible sequences of a given number of words.’

I don’t know too much about the algorithm and how it works but its main focus is ensuring that the content of your pages, paragraph by paragraph are relevant and on topic. So it appears that G is fighting back against machine generated content and the duplicate content created private label rights articles.

You’ll be hearing a lot of buzz about this over the coming months and people will be devising new strategies to get sites with weak content to rank well. I will be maintaining the same search engine practices as always, for the time being at least. I will however be encouraging the deployment of a new model for web development and structure that incorporates blog pages within my standard web content management framework.