On Friday I made the claim that SEO is by definition antagonistic to search engines. That the work that search marketers, including me, do takes advantage of any current state in search technologies to improve the search traffic of our clients.

“We as an industry are 100% counter productive to the goal of the search engines. Whether we are following the rules or not we are gaming the system and necessarily changing that system to compensate.”

Definitely the first portion is inflammatory, but I fully stand behind the second statement. Some of the responses that I received make me want to give a longer response than a comment:

Rand Fishkin comment from The Brash SEO’s Antifesto

I 100% disagree with this, Carlos:

“We as an industry are 100% counter productive to the goal of the search engines. Whether we are following the rules or not we are gaming the system and necessarily changing that system to compensate.”

Search engines survive because they can retrieve good stuff for their searchers. Our job, collectively is to make that good stuff and make it accessible and popular. The search engines have only to weed out the good from the bad. They count on us to know what searchers need or fill the unfilled gaps (and make a better version of what existed before).

The adversarial mindset in Information Retrieval and SEO needs to stop – we’re usually on the same team – making searchers happy.

Randy Ray, Comment in response to SEO Irony

“Any intentional attempt to show up in the search engines defeats the search engines purpose.”

When I put a keyword phrase in the title tag of my page, I’m communicating to the user and to the search engine what my page is about. That doesn’t defeat the search engine’s purpose, it supports its purpose. The only time it would defeat the search engine’s purpose is if I added a keyword phrase to my title tag that lied about what my page is about.

“They need to assume that all content is equal to deliver the best results, so our work creates the need to filter to combat our effect.”

That’s exactly the opposite of what they need to assume. Some content is better than other content, and the search engines need to assume that this is so in order to rank results. A search engine couldn’t rank results if it assumed that all content is equal.

I am discovering that talking about complex issues in a blog is somewhat restrictive. Hopefully I can make my view clearer in this post by focusing on a single point: Search Engines change constantly because their input is changing.

Search engines start simple: there are websites and there are words on them. This is simple — find the words.

Just finding the words fails because poeple start stuffing.

So search factors become more complicated there are URLs, titles, headers, semantic mark-up, connections, etc. Now that there are so many factors they all have to be weighted. This is where layers of complexity start to grow. With every algorithm change the value of your factors change in relation to each other.

Once you exhaust the value of your first set of indicators the value of your results decay because they become stagnant, eventually all content moves toward sameness for queries that are targeted. So another layer of indicators is added to relationally devalue common factors, like same title words or URL qualities. Every factor can eventually become omnipresent. If the search engines don’t change the way they approach resolving queries all of the top results will say roughly the same thing. That is not what serves searchers, that is why new factors keep being added like Freshness.

There are countless search phrases that have at least 100 people who are trying to be on the first page. Of course they can’t all be there. They can all change their text, accrue links, add images, change structure, re-design, or any other factor. Search engines treat all sites equal in regards applying the same factors to all content. As the degree of difference falls new factors will be added or old factors will be changed/subtracted to achieve valuable results.

Google, with its 200 factors, is obviously taking the complexity approach. They already selectively revalue specific searches, as described in the freshness article:

Some complaints involve simple flaws that need to be fixed right away. Recently, a search for “French Revolution” returned too many sites about the recent French presidential election campaign — in which candidates opined on various policy revolutions — rather than the ouster of King Louis XVI. A search-engine tweak gave more weight to pages with phrases like “French Revolution” rather than pages that simply had both words.

Of course the results related to the election were not spam, but they where highly valuable content that defeated the current search system. With each page of high quality content that is put out on a term the greater need there is for a system rebalancing. We will always see search engine rebalancing until there is a totally new system for search.

Search Marketers accelerate the change by creating strong content in volume, making the content more homogeneous until the algorithm revalues that content.