The Changing SEO Landscape

A lot of people are calling for the death of the traditional SEO craft. We are moving towards a brave new world, they say, one where Google will increasingly be able to mine your dataset and carefully craft “custom” searches for you. Let’s paint a scenario that uses one of the many possible resources Google has access to. Consider it the simplistic “doomsday” scenario, one that renders moot all that keyword analysis and rank progress you’ve done. Scary I know, but read on.

Let’s say an unwitting end user named Barbara is preparing another chili dinner for her out of town friends. She does what she always does, hits up Google for a term like “great chili recipe.” First up, RecipeDonkey.com has worked their ass off to rank for that term, and is usually #1. SuperRecipes.com is a great site, almost considered an authority, and isn’t as good as is RecipeDonkey.com for that term, but is usually top 5.

However, Barbara has visited SuperRecipes.com hundreds of times and always leaves the page open for 40-60 minutes while she prepares the dish. She rarely has done this for RecipeDonkey.com. Because Google provides the analytics for both sites, they can see that Barbara hangs out at SuperRecipes.com a lot longer. So, Google customizes Barbara’s results for the sites she prefers. They put SuperRecipes.com number #1. Why are they number 1? Because Barbara thinks they have the best content, not Google.

The big question is if Google considers unconventional information like analytics? And the answer is… of course! How stupid would it be to ignore all that wonderful, wonderful data?

And what other information do they have access too? Think Google Checkouts, YouTube and Blogger. Think out further. With IP tracking, they can target geography (do southerners prefer recipe sites with extra spicy recipes?). Now imagine Google automatically uncovering connections and correlations (who cares about causal or effectual reactions, it exists is enough). With enough data and time, it will basically be a social black box. Perhaps it will eventually predict future trends about, well, anything people search for. HAL anyone?