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
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