It's a stupid question really, but, with so many charlatans out there, you would be forgiven for believing it was true. But who does win at the SEO game?
The trouble arises from the conflict at the heart of the web between the web user or customer, who wants to find what he or she is looking for and feel that ththeir's is a neutral search, and the massive commercial empires at the heart of the search engine world. Even this would be something we could cope with if we knew exactly how the need to be commercial affected the way that the search engines distort the process of searching. The commercial process, however, has made the search process unreliable.
If you dont believe me, try a a couple of random searches.
For no particular reason (and I have absolutely no interest in them really except I needed something minor to look for), I googled "katana" (those curvy Japanese swords that feature in Kurosawa films). Top of the list was Wikipedia. That in itself is unusual these days, but it makes sense. Wikipedia is the biggest source of online information there is, and, on the whole a trustworthy source of information.
Unusually, there were no paid for adverts at the top or the side of the page, so the next listings would reflect all the top Google SEO criteria - good keywords, regular update of content, high value content, well-structured site and so on. I checked the top three sites, none of which was doing anything much in SEO terms apart from following the rules. But none of them were special; none of them majored on blogs, Facebook or Twitter links, they were just sites selling Japanese fighting equipment. And so it went on for the next few sites, all of them slightly old-fashioned, all of them selling the same sort of thing. This was a world where nothing much had to change, you just needed to hang on in there to be top of the rankings.
Contrast this when I typed in "dishwashers". Woooah, quite a different experience. Nothing but in your face sites shouting their prices at me. There was no way, I was going to find out anything about the history of dishwashers. For that I would have had to go to Wikipedia first. This time when I checked on the sites, it was clear that the big companies (Tesco, Sainsbury's Comet, Argos and so on, peppered with a few manufacturers) were paying big bucks to draw the consumer's attention to their offerings.
This, if you like, is the new world of search - dominated by those who pay the most.
So who would I want to be? The consumer - not really, because I was faced with too much choice - like having a stick pushed continuously in your face: the advertiser - maybe, but only if I was in the top two or three, otherwise my PPC would be a waste of money: Google - yes, of course, because I have structured the system to suit my business.
If you don't believe me, you need only look at the rise on Google online quarterly profits to $2.79 billion you see who tis the winner.
Read more
