

Ask HN: Is there demand for a completely new kind of SEO? - franze

I'm an SEO. Yeah.. I know.... I too believe that SEO is a bullsh<i>t industry. The thing is: I despise SEO as it is currently applied to the online world, but I'm pretty good at it. So what to do: Start a company, disrupt the field (completely).<p>SEO is a mixture a marketing, biz dev, product development and technology (that's the cool part) - glued together by esoteric concepts (trust, link juice, ...) and a sh</i>tload of magic numbers (pagerank, ranking, mozrank,...). That's the awful part.<p>These esoteric, unquantifiable concepts together with magic, nontransparent, incoherent, foggy numbers lead to a state where everyone can advocate -in a seemingly logic way- the bad decisions he or she wants to make.<p>There are some companies out there which promised to solve these issues, but instead just delivered more and more magic numbers.<p>I want to get rid of it all. Instead of idiotic concepts i want the SEO world to work with hard, cold data and trends based on that data, instead of magic numbers we should create and work with traceable, comparable figures.<p>Oh, and I'm not targeting the goody two shoes companies out there which want to keyword optimize their title tags, but with companies which already mastered SEO but believe there must be a next level.<p>Oh yeah, and everything (every code) of course open source and every process automatable/scalable.<p>Is there demand for that? Or is SEO good enough for your company? Or is SEO already in such a bad condition, that it would be better to let the patient die?
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nostrademons
My guess is that someone's already doing it. I've heard rumors of ex-Googlers
that are using genetic algorithms to develop SEO models, which then
automatically adjust whenever Google changes their ranking algorithm. There's
a well-defined fitness function - your site's Google ranking in a basket of
common queries - and a limited number of dimensions to generate mutations, so
it seems well suited to that approach.

~~~
aaronwall
The big catch is that some of the signals are abstract and built on non-public
data. And as Google puts more weight on things aligned with "brand" you can
know that they are doing so, but that still doesn't solve the problem of
needing to build brand.

IMHO we are starting to move to the point of SEO where we are moving away from
knowing the data to understanding deeper marketing functions that create the
relevancy signals as a side effect. If you have a higher visitor value than
your competition and can afford to buy more ads than any competitor can then
reinvesting those profits at some point creates a winner take most market
segment where you get a lot of the relevancy signals built as a free side
effect of buying tons of ads.

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apedley
SEO is shifting to Social SEO.

Essentially what you like on facebook, tweet or with a +1 button will become
the higher ranked content.

Link building is a dying concept

Social gives us what we want, great content rising to the top. It is the
future. Develop great content and engage with your followers and network.

Traffic will follow.

~~~
aaronwall
It is worth noting that both Twitter and Facebook have worked to turn their
"relevancy" signals into what amounts to ad units. The signal available there
basically represents things along the lines of either viral humor pieces,
large brand ads, or both.

It is further worth noting that when HP researchers looked at viral Tweets
that they generally represented an echo of content from sources which were
already popular and already had strong distribution channels outside of
Twitter. [http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Data-Central/HP-research-
shows-...](http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Data-Central/HP-research-shows-
mainstream-media-drive-Twitter-trends-to-a/ba-p/87985) So rather than finding
new relevancy signals, it is mostly just re-highlighting/hyping/amplifying
that which is already popular. Add into the pay-to-play models where the
relevancy signals are basically also sold as ad units and I am not very
convinced that these aid true relevancy.

Rather they might just highlight the business operations which already have
plenty of relevancy signals, those doing off topic viral humor pieces, and
those who have large ad budgets to blow through while trying to claim how
innovative their marketing approach is.

All the above said, the ability to monetize the "relevancy" signal will cause
some search engines to want to lean on it, because ultimately if they can
monetize the relevancy signals that allows them to monetize the organic search
results as well, while claiming the results are "organic." I don't expect
Google to want to put a lot of weight on Facebook likes (doing so would
subsidize a directly competing ad network) but I would expect Google to put
significant weight on +1 clicks at some point.

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aaronwall
I think a lot of people inside the field of SEO are trying to go broader so
that if & when a particular search channel is a bit unreliable or
unpredictable (look at how many sites were torched in Google's Panda update)
they can still keep the business afloat through other channels (paid search,
social stuff, email marketing, and so on).

I don't think you can ever really get rid of the fog in search completely
though. If and when you disclose something publicly that reveals an algorithm
weakness, ultimately what happens is people abuse the relevancy signal and
then Google evolves their algorithm to place less weight on that relevancy
signal. The other thing that happens is the cost of trying to influence that
relevancy signal goes up. Some people have highlighted that in some instances
domain names can be part of an SEO's strategy. Eventually that led to
poker.org selling for a million Dollars!

Over time relevancy signals that are shared ultimately either become more
expensive to create, less trusted, or both.

The other thing I would add is that you can know a good bit about what some of
the signals are & it can still be a royal pain in the rear trying to create
those signals. It is easy to write "build links" but search is a winner take
most market & you can lose a lot of money marketing before you hit an
inflection point. The same is true with brand building. And some brand
building efforts are not entirely logical, but some are focused on exploiting
the irrational parts of human nature.

If irrational humans create the relevancy signals you need and irrational
idealistic humans write the algorithms that grade those signals, then just
rationally looking at the numbers does not guarantee you will be able to
compete. You can be 100% right and still be plenty unprofitable in many
business ventures.

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webholics
I also see a problem in the current shift in technology we see from websites
in document form to full-features webapplications (HTML5, JS). Google is
pushing this shift, too. But search robots still don't execute JS. Therefore
it is not easy to develop a modern webapplication for users with good UIs and
at the same time optimize for search robots.

~~~
aaronwall
IMHO the big picture issue here is not just the increasing complexity to
develop across, but that more and more layers of media are being commoditized
and owned by the search providers.

\- Search engines let others build communities and filter out the noise, then
scrape the reviews & replace the sources with place pages. \- Expanded
snippets (and review scraping) allows the search result to act as the
individual product level page. Some custom vertical filters (like the Google
recipes search) now allow Google to eat the category level pageview as well.
Microformats encourage even more structuring of data, and as it is structured
the independent sources of data become commoditized when the data is
repeatedly structured in an easy way that allows search engines to displace
the end data source. \- Ecommerce sites submit feeds & in AdWords they can bid
on a CPA basis...there are a lot of 1-word searches where Google shows me some
random product ad & they are collecting all that aggregate feedback. They are
not the only ones monetizing down the tail though. Search Bing for "mother's
day gifts" and they have some ugly shopping promotion above their organic
results. Search Yahoo! for something like "mortgage rates" and check out the
ad in the _organic_ results. \- Then there are tons of other sorta attacks on
the organic results in terms of verticals (books, videos, local, etc.) as well
vertical ads (mortgage, credit cards, hotels prices, etc.) as well larger ad
units that push the organic search results down, and finally even new search
result formats which use way more whitespace to push the organic results
further off the screen. \- Then there are mobile applications and mobile
search interfaces that further put themselves between searchers and anything
"algorithmic/organic/unpaid" and the end user, replacing it with higher ad
density.

SEO was a growth industry for at least a decade, but in the US now I think it
is more a game of increasing competition fighting for a smaller pie.

What makes it doubly hard for smaller businesses is that with the Panda update
Google directly stepped away from the pure algorithmic approach and decided to
subsidize brands. Great if you are brand, but not so good if you are not. Of
course, a lot of businesses do not have the scale needed to justify large
investments in brand advertising. Geico can spend nearly a billion Dollars a
year on ads, but whoever reads this probably can't. ;)

