Search Engine Optimization: Designed to Sell Google Advertising
May 26, 2020
Many years ago, I gave a talk at one of Search Engine Land’s conferences. I am not sure how I ended up on the program. At that time I was focused on enterprise search and some work for the US government. I showed up, gave a talk about enterprise search, and sat in on several round tables. The idea was, as I recall, that speakers sat at a table and people could sit down and talk about search. I was like a murder hornet at a five year old’s birthday party. Not only did I have any context for questions like “How do I get my department’s content to rank highly in our local search engine?” And “What ideas do you have for making content relevant?” That was the last time I accepted an invitation to give a talk at a search engine optimization conference. If you want to manipulate corporate content, just do it directly. What’s with the indexing thing?
The topics were designed to give a marketer who knew essentially zero about search of any kind information to game a relevance ranking system. The intent of the conference organizer (who eventually became a search evangelist or apologist for Google) and the attendees had zero, zilch, nada, to do with getting on point answers to a query.
I typically confine my annoyance at search engine optimization to comments I offer in my blog Beyond Search/Dark Cyber. If a scam artist sends me asking me to include a link to another blog, I respond and point out I will reproduce those emails about cyber crime. That usually causes the bot or whoever is sending me emails to go away.
I want to take this opportunity to state what was obvious to me when the SEO (the acronym for the relevance-killing discipline of search engine optimization) industry began taking bait dangled by Google.
Here’s how this multi-year, large-scale digital pipeline works. The diagram below shows a marketer or Web site owner eager to get the site into a search engine. Being indexed, of course, is not enough. The Web site must appear on the first page of a Web search system’s results pages. The person seeking traffic has two choices and only two choices: Get traffic with the content (text, audio, or video) providing the magnetism or pay to play. Buy ads. Get traffic. Period.
Put content on the page with index terms (now called tags) and make sure the Web page conforms to Google’s rules. Despite Google’s protestations, the company accounts for an astounding 95 percent of the search queries in the US and Western Europe. Google has competition in China which holds down Google’s share of market in the Middle Kingdom. For all practical purposes, embracing Google’s web master guidelines, conforming to AMP, and making modifications decreed by Google is helpful in getting indexed. The first path appears to be easy. When it fails, the search engine optimization experts are ready to assist.
The second path to traffic is to buy Google Advertising. Google has a desire to become the premier place for large-scale media campaigns. Google will sell ads to small outfits, but the money comes from having Fortune 1000 companies and their ilk buy Google advertising. The problem is that Google Advertising costs money. The interface is designed to be like a game, a gambling game at that. The results from Google ads can be difficult to connect to a specific sale. Nevertheless, ads are option two.
How does the pipeline work? What is the feedback mechanism that enriches some SEO experts? Why are the two options symbiotic? I want to provide brief answers to each of these questions.
How does the pipeline work? (Perhaps the word “grooming” might be appropriate here?)
This is an easy question. Not buying ads means that most Web sites will get almost zero traffic. Web search is a pay-to-play operation. Google has its own list of bluebirds, canaries, and sparrow. (A bluebird is a Web site that Google must index no matter what. An example is whitehouse.gov, stanford.edu, and cnn.com. A sparrow is an uninteresting Web site which may get indexed on an irregular or relaxed cycle. The canary? That’s a Web site which may not be indexed comprehensively or if indexed, updated on a delayed basis.) With more than 35 billion Web sites wanting to be indexed by Google and the lesser online systems, the no-ads option seems attractive. Therefore, Google encourages SEO experts to pitch their services.
Now here’s the kicker. Web sites which do not buy ads struggle to get clicks. SEO experts make suggestions and may make changes in their customers’ Web pages. But nothing delivers traffic unless an anomaly or a particular item of information catches attention which delivers large numbers of clicks. Google dutifully indexes that which attracts clicks, thus creating more demand. More demand means that indexing those “magnetic” pages makes ad sales “obvious”. Traffic allows Google to chop through its ad inventory. Relaxed queries for words related to “magnetic” sites is an obvious technical play to sell more ads. Thus, SEO experts lucky enough to have a customer pulled into the maelstrom of a “magnetic” page is happy. If Google wants a change, that Web site operator will make the change. If an SEO expert is involved, the Google change is packaged with assurance that “traffic will arrive in an organic way.” Organic in the lingo of the SEO expert means “you don’t have to pay to get traffic.”
So what? Groomed or indoctrinated SEO experts set the stage to help Google get their requirements and methods adopted without telling a Web site operator “You must do this.” Second, the SEO experts make money pushing the fluff about organic traffic. Third, Web site operators who benefit from the effect of “magnetic” sites on their Web site become noisy advocates of SEO.
There is a but.
At any time, Google’s algorithms can decrement a Web site living by organic traffic. Google can also manually intervene and slow the flow of traffic to a Web site. The mechanism ranges from blacklists to adding a url or entity to a list of sites with “negative” quality scores. I have explained the notion of “quality” as defined by Google in my The Google Legacy and Google Version 2.0 monographs, originally published by Infonortics but out of print due to the skill print publishers have in committing hair Kari.
What happens when a Web site loses traffic? Some sue like Foundem; others go out of business. Many simply accept the loss of traffic as fate and either buy Google Advertising or run back into the La-La land of SEO assurances that traffic will again flow organically after we wave our magic wand.
Other companies bite the bullet and buy Google advertising. Examples range from companies who pull advertising because their ads appear adjacent objectionable content. These companies go back because Google is a de facto gatekeeper for high-volume online traffic. Other companies decide that they need to pay SEO experts AND buy Google Advertising.
This is a sweet operation because:
Google has evangelists who tell those with Web pages what specific changes are needed to make a Web page conform to a Google-defined standard. Conformance to Google standards reduces computational load. There are tens of thousands of Google’s “SEO helpers” creating what Google wants and needs.
When the SEO experts fail to deliver clicks, you know what happens? Google Advertising to the only life saver on the digital beach.
SEO is a game played for free or organic traffic. Google controls the information highway. Stay in your lane and do what we want. Make a tiny error. Well, Google Advertising, a friendly Google inside sales professional or certified SEO expert can get you out of the mud.
SEO experts are sure to object to my characterization of their efforts as Google pre-sales. But some SEO experts make money and one SEO expert became an honest-to-goodness Googler.
From my point of view, SEO is a complement to Google Advertising. Want traffic? Buy Google’s ads. The Google knows, and it gets the pay-to-play money, its gets the support and love of the SEO “experts”, and Google gets a third party pounding Web sites into the Google cookie cutter.
What happens if an outfit doesn’t play Foosball by Google’s rules? Just ask Foundem or the TradeComet executives.
If you are not on Google, you may not exist. That’s what makes the pipeline work and plugs in the Google money machine: Pay to play. It is a business model guaranteed to cement increasingly irrelevant results to users’ minds. And what happens when Google shapers results? You decide based on the information you “find” in Google, usually above the fold and more than 90 percent of the time without clicking to Page 2.
If you want more search engine optimization information, point your browser to this page of titles and hot links on Xenky.com. (Some of these articles identify SEO experts who are avowed hustlers. Is SEO a playground for digital Larry Flynts?)
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2020
Crazy Enterprise Search Market Report for May 25, 2020
May 25, 2020
Another crazy enterprise market report is now available. This one skips when the report was written, falling back on the vague word “recent.” In fact, my hunch is that this is one dicey report marketed under different aliases in order to gin up sales.
What’s in this gem from Market Study Report. The write up about the report promises:
The recent document on the Enterprise Search market involves breakdown of this industry as well as division of this vertical. As per the report, the Enterprise Search market is subjected to grow and gain returns over the predicted time period with an outstanding growth rate y-o-y over the predicted period.
Yep, outstanding. Obviously the global economic downturn has not had an impact on the half century young enterprise search software sector.
Enterprise search solutions are hot items. Forget hand sanitizer and surgical masks, enterprise search solutions are the barn burners. Are their lines of eager customers queuing outside of Algolia, Coveo, Elastic, IBM Omnifind’s office, Lucidworks, and Microsoft’s search facility in Beijing? Sure, sure, long lines. No social distancing either. Jostling and crowding is what happens when a sizzler is on offer.
The report presents information “with regards to the geographical landscape.” Yep, but how many languages do enterprise search systems support?
What’s interesting is the list of companies analyzed in the report? Here you go:
Attivio Inc
Concept Searching Limited
Coveo Corp
Dassault Systemes
Expert System Inc
Hyland
IBM Corp
Lucid Work (Would it be helpful if the report authors spelled the name of the company correctly, wouldn’t it?)
Marklogic Inc
Micro Focus
Oracle
SAP AG
Microsoft
X1 Technologies
There are some notable omissions, but I won’t provide these names. Obviously I am not hip to where enterprise search is at at this moment.
In the three editions of the Enterprise Search Report I wrote, it never crossed my mind to include this a manufacturing cost structure analysis. Poor stupid me.
What seems clear is that whoever is marketing this report recycles the content under different names, hoping for a sale.
The data in the report, one hopes, is more polished than the promotional material.
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2020
How to Be an Expert: A Very Troubling Method
May 20, 2020
DarkCyber found itself worrying about knowledge. Epistemology is not exactly the hot topic in the midst of the collapse of the unicorns, blue skies in Wuhan, and tiny animals in major US cities.
The write up “4 Unexpected Methods for Becoming an Authority on Nearly Any Subject” contains some troubling advice. DarkCyber fears that many search engine optimization, content marketing, and MBA carpetbaggers will be off to the races after taking the advice in the Copyblogger article.
Make Stuff Up and Tell People Who Don’t Know the Subject
We noted with some discomfort:
If you’re the best in the place where your customers hang out, you’re the best. Don’t turn your nose up at being a big fish in a small pond. There’s a lot of success, satisfaction, and wealth to be found in small ponds.
We think this means make up stuff and pitch it to drop outs from the Baraboo clown school. Is that right?
Another point caught our attention:
Make complicated topics easy to understand.
Yes, but… and the but is important. What if the person explaining quantum mechanics or RNA replication does not understand these subjects. Isn’t this similar to the previous idea of pitching incorrect or misleading information to hungry minds in Thurmon, West Virginia.
Teach the subject.
Okay, a person who does not know the subject teaches the methods of nuclear fuel management and also Hopf fibration calculations. That sounds like a winning approach. How does one get this teaching job, pray tell?
Commit to a sincere desire to help.
What? So a person without the requisite expertise is going to supervise drone operations in a war zone? Is a person with zero knowledge of financial markets is going to engage in currency trading at a quant firm on Wall Street?
The write up illustrates the disdain the marketing profession has for those with concrete, high value information. This is not intellectual dishonesty. The use of any of these methods is far worse.
The enshrinement of duplicity. Super.
Stephen E Arnold, May 20, 2020
Lucidworks: Buzzwording in the Pandemic
May 19, 2020
Lucid Imagination (the outfit which contributed some Lucene/Solr talent to Amazon search) renamed itself Lucidworks. The company then embarked on becoming a West Coast version of Fast Search & Transfer, a Splunk like outfit, and now a customer support provider.
That’s a remarkable trajectory for a company built on open source software with more than $200 million in funding since 2007.
One of the DarkCyber researchers spotted “Lucidworks Develops Deep Learning Solution to Make Chatbots Smarter.” The story appeared in a New Zealand online publication. That’s interesting, but more intriguing is that Lucidworks is following in the marketing footsteps of Attivio, Coveo, and other vendors of search and retrieval. The destination customer service. Who doesn’t love automated customer support chat robots, self serve Web sites with smart software, and the general extinction of individuals who actually know a company’s software or hardware products?
The write up states:
Deep learning is essential for automated chatbots to understand natural language questions and to provide the right answers, which is something that AI-powered search firm Lucidworks has taken on board.
And why?
According to Lucidworks, companies rely on digital portals to provide information to users, whether digital commerce customers looking for product information before purchase, employees hunting for an HR document, or someone looking for an airline’s updated cancellation policies. Information is often scattered across disparate silos and is impossible for a user to locate using natural language questions.
But smart software is available from Amazon with a credit card and some free training courses. Outfits from Algolia to Voyager Search offer the service.
What is interesting is the buzzword salad tossed into this reheated plastic container of mapo tofu:
- AI (artificial intelligence)
- Automated
- Chatbots
- Conversational
- Deep learning
- Digital portals
- Engagement
- Experiences
- Fusion
- Natural language
- Satisfaction
- User intent
- Virtual assistants
Quite vocabulary and what seems an exercise in content marketing. Plus, eager customers in New Zealand will have an opportunity to help the company repay its investors the $200 million plus interest. That works out to 13 years in the enterprise search wilderness before arriving at chatbots.
Options abound and many of them are open source and well documented.
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2020
Crazy Expert Report: Covid19 and Enterprise Search? Really?
May 18, 2020
I received a notification from an online information service called WaterClouds Reports and Kandj and Prof Research. What? Water clouds, Kandj, and Prof Research. Will too many flailing experts spoil the content free soufflé?
Plus, the water thing meshes nicely with Beyond Search and DarkCyber.
What’s WaterCloud Reports up to these days? The answer is delivering information purporting to be about market research, news and reports using a number of different business identities. Suspicious? Yep, very suspicious.
I learned:
The news concerns “The Absolute Report Will Add the Study for Impact of Covid 19 in Enterprise Search Software.”
Now that’s a small dump truck of nuttiness.
What’s in this report available from and outfit called Kandj Market Research and not Water Cloud Reports?
Check this lingo with Covid tacked at the end:
The recent report titled “The Enterprise Search Software Market” and forecast to 2024 published by KandJ Market Research is a focused study encompassing the market segmentation primarily based on type and application. The report investigates the key drivers leading to the growth of the Enterprise Search Software market during the forecast period and analyzes the factors that may hamper the market growth in the future. Besides, the report highlights the potential opportunities for the market players and future trends of the market by a logical and calculative study of the past and current market scenario. The Final Report Will Include the Impact of COVID – 19 Analysis in This Enterprise Search Software Industry.
The news story suggests that the multi thousand dollar report may not be completed. Is it possible that this digital container of loopy zeros and ones is only completed when someone buys a copy?
No problem. Enterprise search is definitely a hot topic when Covid 19 is involved. Whip out your credit card. The report costs $4,000. There’s a deal too. Fork over $6,000 and you get an enterprise license. In the average WFH company, how many employees are hungering to read a report about enterprise search and Covid 19?
Answer: Not many.
What big time enterprise search vendors are included? Here’s the partial list. You have to spit out an email in order to see names of the other five vendors:
AddSearch
Algolia
Apache Solr
Elasticsearch
SearchSpring
Swiftype
Two open source systems apparently have reacted to Covid 19 for enterprise search. Also four other firms have put on their digital N95 masks and tried to “save” search.
Several observations:
- Outright scam or just a high school term paper? DarkCyber is leaning to the scam end of the spectrum?
- Covid 19. Nothing thrills like a key word which may attract clicks from the curious or the clueless.
- Kandj and the cloud whatever? Wow.
Not even Forrester, Gartner, Kelsey, and other mid tier consulting firms use this type of marketing. Well… sometimes?
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2020
A Food Program Online: Shortages? What Shortages?
May 15, 2020
Retailers have adapted their sales model to serve customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Humanity’s best qualities have also surfaced as we help each other during the bleak present. Combining charity and shopping in one, Walmart and Nextdoor launched a new assistance program. Techcrunch shares the story: “Nextdoor And Walmart Partner On A New Neighborly Assistance Program.”
Nextdoor is a neighborhood social network and the new “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” endeavor will allow vulnerable people to request shopping assistance from their neighbors who are already going to Walmart. Nextdoor users will post assistance requests in local groups via the Web site or app. Users can work out details through private messages or a message board.
The “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” is a low cost alternative to grocery delivery services and will help vulnerable people on fixed incomes.
The program is voluntary and Walmart is not monitoring the program. Walmart only partnered with Nextdoor to facilitate the “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” program.
“‘We’re inspired everyday by the kindness of people around the world who are stepping up and helping out. In recent weeks, we’ve been blown away by the number of members who have raised their hand to run an errand, go to the grocery store, or pick up a prescription for a neighbor,’ said Sarah Friar, Nextdoor CEO, about the feature. ‘We’re grateful for Walmart’s partnership to make this important connection between neighbors around vital services, and we’re proud to come together to ensure everyone has a neighborhood to rely on,’ she said.”
Helping vulnerable people during the COVID-19 pandemic is important, but the people who would use the “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” program could also be made targets via the same service. Nextdoor has useful information about crime which is not comprehensively indexed right now. The data about shopping and the “address / location” of those in need is a potential problem for users and an opportunity for bad actors to know whom to target.
And if there are food shortages? Virtue signals will light up.
Whitney Grace, May 15, 2020
Can Covid Virtue Signals Beep More Loudly? Sure
May 12, 2020
The Filipino Department of Health (DOH), Senti AI, and Google have combined their powers to fight COVID-19. Infochat reports on the development in the article, “DOH Partners With Google To Unify COVID-19 Communications Nationwide Using Artificial Intelligence.” The Filipino Department of Health wants to use Google and Senti AIs’ advanced technology to centralize communications related to COVID-19 so all information is consistent and updated. The plan is to use Senti AI’s AI-enhanced knowledge management tool that uses Google technologies.
The DOH has partnered with other communication organizations before, but COVID-19 information is constantly changing. The lack of a centralized communication systems increases information delays or different versions. Consistency, frequency, and rapidly are the DOH’s main goals with the Senti AI and Google partnership.
The new communication management tool will contain COVID-19 FAQs, latest government guidelines, and public and health worker inquiries. The tool will also simplify the information search and allow the DOH to update/modify contents.
“‘The DOH hopes that this effort can mitigate the spread of fake news by providing a reliable and verified source of information that can be accessed by all citizens,’ said DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario S. Vergeire. ‘Now more than ever, it’s crucial that all Filipinos act as one to overcome these difficult times. We need to be quick, focused, and united in the way we work together because there is no room for miscommunication and delay when lives are at stake. This is why it’s a very big honor for us to serve our country through this technology,’ said Ralph Regalado, CEO of Senti AI.”
Unfortunately the COVID-19 communications tool is only being developed for the Philippines. With all the news outlets and technology, could the US make use of this system?
Whitney Grace, May 12, 2020
SEO Groan: The Business of Hustling
May 8, 2020
DarkCyber has noted an uptick in the rhetoric for search engine optimization. SEO, as the dark art is referenced by its supporters, focuses on methods for making a Web site appear in Google search results.
Over the years, search engine optimization has worked as a feeder for online advertising. After SEO fails, what’s a company do to generate business in the datasphere?
The answer, “Advertise online.” Several companies are dominant in online advertising. These are the Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Google’s angle has been to hook advertisers’ messages to search terms. One part of the method was the work of engineers at Oingo (renamed to Applied Semantics before Google purchased the company). Facebook has its social graph to allow precise demographic advertising. Amazon has its user data, its customers’ purchase history, and sellers vying to get the attention of Amazon customers.
For the moment, let’s focus on the search advertising segment. When a user formulates a query, say, for example, “mountain bike gear replacement,” Google displays a long page of results. Here’s a snippet:
The page contains a link to a catalog of gear parts. That’s the Google Shopping service. Advertisers get a free listing as Google tries to win back product search which Amazon now dominates. Google was a contender with Google Froogle, but when the team lost interest, the product joined other discontinued services. Someone in Google management may have wanted Froogle to be enhanced, but that type of directed management is not often evident. Therefore, Amazon had the field of product search to itself.
The page also display pictures of parts. These range in price from $217 to almost $1,000. Then there is a video which is marked as a suggested clip. Google tells me that the replacement section is 49 seconds after the video starts.
Next is a map which shows where bicycle shops in Louisville, Kentucky, are located. Presumably Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart will have gear replacement parts. (They don’t.) Then there are more videos. Next are common questions? None of the questions addresses the replacement aspect of my query.
And after these items of information, there are links which address the “how to” aspect of my query. There’s a link to replacement gears available on Amazon”
And the first page of search results concludes with images of bicycle gears and suggested queries:
It is obvious that Google search engineers have looked at user queries and developed a template into which a range of information has been inserted. Links, videos, ads, and traditional links to “relevant” pages.
Where does SEO come into play? Presumably the pages which are squeezed between the ads, the video, and the images, and suggested searches are the knowledge beef.
An inspection of these links reveals that the results are not Kobi beef. The information provided is a fruit basket.
One assumes that each of the Web pages contains high value content related to gear replacement. No, but several of the pages are in a gray zone. The gears have become “cassettes.” The idea of replacement is related to the cost of getting the parts and installing them. And there are buying guides.
Is the search useful? The answer is, “It depends.” Since Google’s approach does not allow the user to disambiguate a query with a form which allows the user to say, “No, pictures, no videos, and no images.” Quite a bit of scanning and scrolling are necessary before locating the one link which addresses the query. This is the link to a StackExchange page:
SEO is partly responsible. Pages only tangentially related to the query are interpreted by Google as highly relevant to the query. To Google’s credit, its vaunted PageRank system located one useful link. But the other information is handwaving and an excuse to display ads.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO experts working to help people get pages listed in a Google search result whether those SEO infused pages are useful to the user or not. When SEO fails, what does the vendor do? As stated above, the answer is to buy Google ads.
SEO Groan will take a look at some of the more interesting SEO experts. One example is the content presented in a series of videos labeled as The Hustle Show. You can view these via the links on this page.
SEO Groan believes the word “hustle” is an excellent one. It captures the essence of search engine optimization. Watch for our announcement of a special page on our law enforcement and intelligence centric Web site. The goal is to provide information so that individuals will be aware of what is a cyber scam.
Net net: Articles like these underscore what’s happening at this time in the world of SEO services:
- 4 Tips to Build a Strong SEO Program During COVID-19
- 7 Ways COVID-19 Is Affecting Search Traffic & How SEOs Can Respond
- Turning to SEO Due to Covid 19? Start Here
- How to Leverage Insights in Botify to Adapt During the COVID-19 Outbreak: 12 SEO Questions Answered
And there are more. That’s not just Covid disease surfing; the implication that SEO is appropriate during a pandemic is a quite disturbing signal.
Stephen E Arnold, May 8, 2020
Get Your Page to Be Number One: Tricks Worthy of Penn and Teller
May 7, 2020
The DarkCyber research team has been examining SEO or search engine optimization in the time of Covid. The work has uncovered some interesting and quite unusual information.
Examples range from “Adapting Your SEO Strategy to Soften the Impact of COVID-19 on Organic Traffic” to “10 ways SEO Will Lead Companies Through COVID-19 Business Recovery.”
Even HP is manufacturing devices to help deal with the Covid crisis. IBM is putting the capable Jeopardy-winning Watson in the hand of Covid researchers. Plus Tesla is allegedly making medical devices. These are Covid crisis virtue signals with alleged substance.
But manipulating content to “soften the impact of Covid” and “business recovery.”
These two headlines underscore the intellectual black hole of search engine optimization. SEO’s informing idea is that one can shape content and index that content so that the content becomes number one in a Google search page.
But what if the content is incorrect, misinformed, or just plain wrong? What happens if SEO does not work?
Well, one can buy Google AdWords. There’s the magic link.
A good example of what’s in these articles which are hooking their ideas to the pandemic can be found on YouTube. Navigate to How to Get My Website on the First Page of Google. What’s displayed? Here’s the screenshot:
Yep, hustling a time-honored business practice.
This essentially sums up the knowledge value of SEO in a time of Covid. Very professional, informative, and just maybe a big hustle in our opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2020
Looking more SEO info? Watch for our special Xenky.com page. In the meantime, you may find these stories useful:
SEO Hustles: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2020/05/04/seo-let-us-hustle-everyone/
Covid surfing: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2020/05/06/virtue-signaling-a-covid-short-circuit
Marketing to doctors in the midst of a pandemic: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2020/05/06/unusual-medical-marketing/
Virtue Signaling: A Covid Short Circuit
May 6, 2020
One of the DarkCyber team sent me a link to “COVID-19 & SEO: Why SEO Is More Important Now Than Ever.” The impact of the article was, “Befuddlement.” The phrase “more important than ever” assumes that search engine optimization was important in the first place.
I have long held the belief that online advertising vendors used search engine as mechanism to drive ad sales. Based on the research for Google Version 2: The Calculating Predator, it was clear that manipulating content could cause the “clever” Google PageRank method to boost pages with minimal intellectual value. Therefore, if you can’t stop weaponized, shaped, or malformed information, what is the benefit of search engine optimization?
The shift coincided with some of my work for the world’s largest source of Web indexed content. By encouraging SEO via an “ambassador” to SEO conferences, online advertising could be positioned as an essential service.
A new Web site is posted. The content is indexed and boosted in the search results. Then over time, the ranking of that “new” site begins to slip down the results page. Nothing the SEO expert does has an impact on the lost results. The customer becomes frustrated and may try another SEO expert. But the site is now essentially not findable.
What’s the solution?
The fix is to purchase online advertising and then traffic returns. Is this magic?
No, it illustrates an aspect of misinformation that gets little purchase in today’s world.
The article “COVID-19 & SEO: Why SEO Is More Important Now Than Ever” illustrates the effort optimization experts expend trying to get a free boost on ad supported “free to use” Web indexes. The word “covid” is lashed to SEO. The argument, noted above, is that SEO is important.
I circled this passage in the write up:
While ecommerce businesses are seeing unmatched results from SEO at the moment — Adobe reports an almost 200% increase in toilet paper purchases alone — companies outside the ecommerce sector are still benefiting from their investment in SEO.
This is interesting logic. Adobe is a word which is used to locate information about Photoshop and other applications. The bound phrase “toilet paper” is a word used frequently on Amazon. (Amazon attracts more product searches now than Google.) But the statement ignores the fact that similar interest in toilet paper occurred in Russia. Perhaps something about the product is causing the searches? Is that something a factor other than SEO?
The search engine optimization sector uses whatever words are needed to generate a boost. Then when the customer finds the SEO less effective, the customer is softened up to buy online ads.
The free Web search systems are under increasing pressure to generate financial returns. This means that the claims of SEO will pay off for those who sell online ads. When the SEO ministrations fail to work, what’s a company to do?
Answer: Buy online ads. Those are going to work.
Why’s this important? Three reasons:
- The symbiosis between SEO and online advertising is not widely discussed.
- Content, even if it is wonky, is needed to give the illusion that an online indexing system is timely and comprehensive. They are neither timely nor comprehensive, but those are separate topics.
- Companies are becoming more and more desperate to make sales. That means that high value information is going to get lost in the barrages of dross.
Are there examples of this activity? Yes, there is the high profile issue between what’s displayed, what’s available, and what’s shown. Navigate to “How Google Search Results Shape, and Sometimes Distort, Public Opinion – and Why You Should Care.”
And there are other examples as well. Take a look at LinkedIn and run a query for “search engine optimization.” You will find a number of experts. At least one of these experts uses an alias. Why? Who is this? We’ll try to answer these questions. Watch for our new feature about SEO deception.
Remember this assertion:
No matter your industry, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented your business with a slew of challenges and difficult decisions, especially when it comes to how you’ll market your company. Compared to other marketing options, SEO offers far more stability and security. It’s a great option for businesses focusing on long-term growth during tenuous times.
One question: “Are the statements accurate?” or are they the shibboleths of the hustler.
Looking for our search engine optimization hustling coverage, click this link.
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2020
Looking for more SEO fancy dancing, read this DarkCyber story at https://wp.me/pf6p2-gdY
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