What is SEO?

The debate about paid links and google continues - they say we mustn’t buy and sell links (unless we mark them as ‘nofollow’) because it distorts the search engine results. Well OK there’s a lot of truth in that. But life is never so simple.

Ignoring for a moment the problems that they will have in identifying which links are paid and which are genuine links - another whole debate - there are a couple of other issues to consider.

First, consider what the search engine results would look like if all reciprocal link agreements and paid links suddenly got completely ignored, as google would like. Many many sites would simply disappear into the ether, but to be replaced by what? In the real world, many sites simply don’t attract links.

Do you link to your local plumbers because they have best prices on showers? Do people link to a hotel listing site because they had a nice holiday there? Well, no. The hotel sites that get linked to are the expedias and tripadvisors of this world, and it is these large, well established sites that will come to rule many aspects of the internet.

The same problem already exists with wikipedia. A great site, we all agree, but how often have I seen a wikipedia page first in the results, only to find that the page itself says ‘this is a stub page - no information is available - please feel free to add some’. Other sites further down the page will have much more useful information by specialists in the subject, who happen not to know about link building and buying.

I believe that if all artificial links were removed from the equation, then a few, enormous, general type websites would come to dominate much of the results.

Second, because most people do know the value of a link, and because webmasters want to keep visitors on their site (usually to buy a product, or click an advert, etc) very few websites link naturally to other sites. I could fill this article with links to external sites, and you’d never reach the end. I could fill a hotel listing site with links to the websites of the individual hotels, but then you’d book with them directly and I’d go out of business.

So the suggestion is - if you remove all artificial links, you open a void. There are many sites in the world, useful and interesting, that simply don’t have links. And never will, because no one will ever find them in the first place.

I am well aware that in webmaster SEO world, we could all link happily to reference websites and useful information. Matt Cutts says something interesting, lots of people link to it. Good. But outside webmaster world (the other 99% of the world) that isn’t what happens. Most of the world don’t pass their time passing comments on interesting blogs, and link baiting. They know nothing of site promotion.

The last concern is - what will happen next. If webmasters can’t promote their sites up the SERPS they won’t bother. Why would I build a useful site about my local tourist destination if I know there is no possibility of getting past a Wikipedia stub page in the results, or the dozens of big hotel sites that are ranked because they have a page titled ‘hotels in sunnyresort’ (although in fact there are no hotels in sunnyresort, the hotel software has an automated page that says there might be).

So I won’t bother and you won’t bother. Which will have two outcomes:

1) A lot of complete crap will be removed from the internet (the intention of the exercise)

2) A lot of good, small, specialist sites will be removed from the internet because they aren’t profitable to develop

So again, we will be left with a much smaller number of mega-sites on the internet, with much less choice, and the consumer will be much worse of.

Webmasters make websites to make money. To achieve that, the wise webmaster makes good quality, interesting sites with the hope of attracting advertising revenues in some form. And for that business plan to work is simply not possible for many without, at least initially, some artificial link-building and buying.

And with this dearth of specialist and interesting websites, I wonder what the impact will be on googles advertising revenue?