| People talk about SEO as a cat&mouse game, but I'm not sure it has to be. Does Google want to win the game, or do they profit from the game continuing? For example... When Google was founded, your site would flourish by the value of its content. But today, given all the SEO that the search engines permit, your options are limited. And one of the big options you're forced to choose from is to pay Google money, to be seen at all in real-world searches by people. "That's a very nice Web site you got. Would be a shame if nobody was to find it." If they wanted to, maybe Google has enough information about the world that it could wipe out the vast majority of SEO, with a zero-tolerance policy. For example... Let's say you do SEO work. Google can probably tell that a site you worked on was SEO'd. So the site gets penalized severely. But there's more. Google probably knows exactly who you are, much of what you work on, who you interact with, etc. After your last clients are burnt to the ground, discoverability-wise, you get an engagement to work on a different site. Google has a good chance of figuring out that, too, and those sites get penalized severely. For engaging in deceptive and manipulative behavior, to rig search engine results, compromising people's ability to access the world's information. "Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." You're not going to keep doing SEO, because nobody wants to pay money to have their site receive search engine perma-death. I'm not saying that this particular approach would be a good thing (and there would have to be a managed transition from the current mass sociopathic frenzy). But saying that the current situation is a cat&mouse game that can't be solved... might mainly be serving the cat and the mouse. Maybe the cat and mouse are in a symbiotic relationship that lets them both milk the cows. |