SEO Anarchy or Web Freedom? (An Open Letter to Google) - I am writing as above all a fan of Google: many of us SEOs also tend to be Google aficionados, but usually it is an unrequited love. As a veteran white-hat Web and print author and editor, information taxonomist, blogger, Web developer, webmaster and, not least of all, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professional who runs an above-average Web dev and SEO consultancy, I speak from what I take to be a fairly representative and well-informed place within my industry.
I am ethically sensitive and sensible, and would not waste your time if I did not believe that the SEO industry’s point of view regarding the new Google updates and policies – as well its growing concerns regarding the shape of its own future – were badly in need of clear articulation at this very moment. The reasons for this are extraordinary.
I feel that SEOchat, being the industry’s top nonpartisan and vendor-neutral professional SEO forum, is just the right venue for such a message as mine and should not be dismissed as a potential vehicle for engaging Google’s attention and indeed negotiating with Google. Although I moderate SEOchat, the specific position expressed in this post is entirely my own.
However, I invite other SEO professionals to share their considered opinions in this thread, which will hopefully give Google a more statistically significant slice of industry opinion concerning Google's recently issued warnings and policy statements and algorithmic changes in regards to SEO practice. (I will personally moderate this thread, and I ask everyone to be relevant and polite.)
Most SEOs are thinking hard today about what may happen to our industry in the near future. Wall Street, NASDAQ, the London Stock Exchange, the Bourse, and lots of others should also be watchful and attentive. There are a few intertwined big issues here whose implications reach far beyond mere SEO.
First of all, it is obvious now, and has been compellingly proven, that by changing its link evaluation system this year, Google has (a) abandoned its do "Do No Evil" policy; and (b) drilled a giant hole in normal business security and stability for all online businesses, making them vulnerable to Hostile SEO. (The euphemism "negative SEO" is too vague for my taste).
When, not too long ago, Google’s engineer John Mu spilled in public that backlinks can potentially hurt your website, most SEOs did not take it seriously. Google could do no evil! Just recently, however, a controlled test has been documented at http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ in which black-hat SEO link building methods were used to reliably and quickly shoot down a number of search rankings of two websites selected for this purpose.
Thies, a fellow white-hatter, posted his complaint on April 16; nine days later, there still has been no response from Google, but I assure you that many of us are waiting for it, alarmed by its absence. (NASDAQ should be experiencing some anxiety as well.)
Second, there are indications everywhere in the industry channels that a gigantic market for Hostile SEO is under construction even as I am writing this. Under Hostile SEO, business goals will be achieved by bombing legitimate websites out of Google’s SERPs (Search ).
This will be done by exploiting the very vulnerabilities that have been created by the 2012 Google updates. This has now moved well beyond the stage of mere rumors:
Hostile SEO vendors have already emerged, but a quick check via Godaddy’s domain search indicates that negativeseo.com (+.org, .net etc.), seoattack.com (etc.), hostileseo.com (etc.), seocarpetbomber.com (!) and numerous other similar domains are all taken, and get this:
"SeoKiller.com is a Premium Domain Name and is available for $1,795.00." Seoterrorist.com is taken (this is not funny), but seoterrorism.com is still available; I’m sure someone will grab that one very soon too.
Third, Google has now explicitly warned the Web world of an imminent new "Overoptimization Penalty" that will soon be unleashed upon us. Since "overoptimization" (who came up with that one, anyway?) is neither a common word of the English language nor any kind of technically precise term of art, it must be Google’s polite and intentionally vague euphemism for SEO itself, as practiced by the mainstream of our profession.
Consistent with this threat are the various “unnatural link warnings,” admittedly two million of them, that Google has recently sent to webmasters in an effort to see how the SEO industry will respond to them, how many will confess to buying links, or at least try to have their bad links removed (another form of admission of guilt), etc. After all, measuring online behavior is what Google has become really good at. But a few things are clear about these unnatural link warnings based on various discussions on the Web:
(1) Plenty of sites that have done no link building have received such warnings anyway.
(2) Plenty of sites that have performed all sorts of dirty SEO tricks have received no warnings.
(3) Submitting sites for Google’s reconsideration and confessing to link buying causes an instant drop in rankings (not the best encouragement for webmasters to come clean).
It appears that the very weapons that Google is aiming at SEOs are backfiring so badly that they seem fully capable of causing wholesale online business anarchy, global economic panic, earthquakes tsunamis in the stock markets, and the loss of countless legitimate businesses.
This can happen right now, unless something is done extremely quickly to stop it. Need I say that Google’s fortune also hangs in the balance? Not to mention the possible demise of the SEO profession as we know it, of the helpful SEO-white-hat-linkbait-genius-and-information-strategist type, along with the emergence of thermonuclear SEO (its hat neither black nor white but the color of an A-bomb dawn).
It can cost any takers as little as $99.99 a month. Outsource it to all you like. In the words of the great poet, William Butler Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…
You have been warned!
Google has long had a biased perception of SEO and especially of its own relationship with the SEO world. Permit me to comment on this as I see fit from within our industry.
(1) Google the company thinks of the Google search algorithm as the sole source and guarantor of the high quality of Google’s search results. This view is false. Since Google’s algorithmic sense-parsing abilities are still weak, the sole source and guarantor of the quality of Google’s search results is the Algo/SEO Combo. Without at least some SEO, Google has no idea what the page is really about.
Forgive me for saying this, but it is SEO, not LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), that truly brings into play relevance, a wealth of synonyms, the whole range of related resources, etc. Furthermore, the presence of SEO is in itself a positive quality signal because it indicates that a website has a budget, which is in turn a sign of a serious, invested, established business, which in turn correlates with higher quality.
Telling Google effectively and efficiently what the Web pages are really about is hard, precise, analytical work. Just as you provide us with free organic search while making a fortune on AdWords, so we provide you, Google, with a free relevance service, while profiting by helping our clients achieve more sales faster. You have found your business model and we have found ours. The Google-SEO relationship is not one of spamming parasitism, but of fair symbiosis, of reciprocal benefit (although I suspect that is not how things look to the Web Spam Team).
(2) In its recent updates and warnings, Google fires a new shot across SEO’s bow and strives to "level the playing field" for websites, to kill off the effects of "overoptimization," of SEO. In doing so, Google mistakenly thinks of its search algorithm as the equalizing factor.
The true equalizer is SEO because it has become an extreme requirement for businesses under the conditions of modern competition. Even as an inveterate white-hatter by preference, I must point out that the simplistic “white hat model” advertised by Google as the path of correct SEO is a myth. "Create great content and don't worry about a thing." It doesn’t work! (I have reached my conclusions independently, but Michael Gray, an outstanding SEO, has tested and argued this extensively and persuasively convincingly on his blog, wolf-howl.com).
The classic white-hat model does not work, or does not work at all well, because (a) search competition has grown exponentially; (b) webmaster’s attitudes to linking have changed: people don’t link as freely and liberally as they used to when there was less pressure to link and fewer worthy things to link to; (c) webmasters cannot be expected to stop participating in the link market if they have websites they can sell links on: it’s a source of income, and life is still a struggle for a lot of us; and (d) if one sticks to the white-hat model exclusively and focuses of creating "great content" as recommended, one’s competition will meanwhile perform black-hat SEO (which is cheaper and much more efficient) and crowd you out of business.
And nowadays it turns out they can also shoot down your rankings at will, so I can't really blame people for wanting to be the first to shoot down their competitors in the dog-eat-dog climate created by Google’s updates.
(3) Even if the above criticisms did not apply to it, the white-hat model is ethically flawed because:
--- (a) It unfairly privileges old businesses (since it takes a longer time for even fantastic content to attract more links naturally, and new websites will necessarily have a hard time).
--- (b) It pretends, unjustly and unilaterally, to dictate Web actions and strategies that are not and in all fairness should not be under Google’s control. The Web is a free space with a low tolerance from quasigovernmental institutions trying to extend their control over it.
However Google adapts to this fact is its own business, but Google no more has the moral right to dictate correct Web practices or declare the buying and selling of links against to be a violation of its terms of service, than I and any other SEO have the right to declare such prohibitions themselves to be a violation of our own terms of service, and to swear to shoot down one random legitimate website (why not whitehoise.gov – aren’t they overoptimized for the market of white buildings?! – or nasdaq.com, or even my alma mater harvard.edu, as it has already been suggested here!) for every page de-indexed by Google.
This may sound grotesque to you and I assure that at this time I have no such intentions personally, but, so far as I can see, there is nothing in the current legislation that can possibly prevent us from doing so. And even if there were, it just might not stop some of us. Plus, at this stage I do not trust the updated, Google-Post-Do-No-Evil algorithm to keep the world safe from such retaliation either.
--- (c) Lastly, the white-hat SEO model forces plumbers in Houston to become publishers of fantastic content about toilets in Houston in hopes that this "great content" will go viral and will help plumbers get more plumbing business via their websites.
However, plumbers’ chief strength lies in plumbing, not publishing, so this is very certainly a self-defeating strategy.
The white-hat myth misleads naïve website owners into wasting time, effort and resources instead of achieving tangible business goals. Eventually, they become frustrated and hire mainstream SEOs who use science to get them rankings. Science wins every day over wishful thinking.
(4) Google should stop priding itself on how secret the search algorithm is. Of course, Google search is a marvelous combination of software and hardware.
Still, there is very little about the algorithm that is both important and unknown. Just as our user behavior is something you admit to testing and analyzing (considering yourselves free to do so in the public interest but also in furtherance of Google’s business interests, ultimately trying to steer commercial searching increasingly toward clicking on AdWords ads), so we, SEOs, have the right to measure the behavior of your algorithm, for exactly similar reasons that should be obvious.
And the algo, I assure you, is perfectly susceptible to empirical testing. Look, you have just recently rolled out your updates and already we know how blog networks are affected, what distinguishes the networks that Google has missed, how the handling of anchor text has changed and what not. And we will know the rest very soon. Google prides itself on how many PhDs it has on its Web Spam Team.
All my respects to them, but there are PhDs among search optimizers as well. I would prefer it that Google does not try to ruin our livelihood by killing off SEO:
this would only force many of us into the Hostile SEO market, which would be, I know, a disaster. For a case in point, think of the huge propagation of computer viruses when the DotCom bubble burst post-2000 and lots of seasoned programmers lost their jobs and filled their newly found leisure by creating successive generations of computer viruses, worms, trojans, botnets and other vermin.
(Some of them monetized their malware, but many were driven by sheer malice and disgruntlement.) SEOs, if similarly frustrated, can turn out to be even more destructive that mere coder geeks.
Dear Google, as I see it, the writing is on the wall. Please keep the peace and try to be more fair. Bad karma can come back to bite you. I strongly recommend that you, first of all, devalue links all you like, de-index linkfarms all you like, disable spam all you like (and thank you for that, from the heart!), but please abandon penalties for linkbuilding.
And second, please revise your general stance on SEO in favor of a more reasonable position. We are here to help you, not to fight you, and we would prefer to keep it that way. Pax Googleana, if you will.
I strongly agree with you that the ultimate indicator of website quality is user behavior. An extremely high bounce rate is a negative signal in most cases (you guys claim you are not using it as a ranking factor, but you should). Please try to be more complete and fair in evaluating user actions. Recognize that "good user experience" behavior is not reducible to noncommercial information seeking.
There is also commercial user behavior, no less important because it is an integral part of our free economy. A hugely important indicator of success here, one which you willfully keep ignoring, is the conversion rate. In a word, I feel, for what it’s worth, that you should recognize the legitimate place of commercial Web pages in organic search results, and not only in AdWords, at the very least because the majority of commercial searches happen organically and not via AdWords.
I believe that you need to arrive at a more complex and balanced way of evaluating user behavior, just as we will always strive continuously to improve our understanding of your algorithm’s behavior. If the worst comes to the worst, a few of us may develop, who knows, an overpenalization optimization. It is only fair in a free world like this one.
My goal here is simply to draw your attention to this matter. I know, too, that my whole industry would be grateful for a considered response from you.
Yours with continued admiration and support,
Philip Nikolayev, PhD
