I think SEO will eventually disappear

The overarching goal of the people at Google is to make it impossible to manipulate rankings and for the best content to rise to the top. They employ some of the smartest people in the world to work all day and night to accomplish this. They're not there yet, but they've made remarkable progress.

If you look at the history of SEO since the internet took off, it's becoming harder and harder. First all you had to do was throw in some keywords, and you'd rank. Then keywords stopped being the end all, and you had to buy/exchange/solicit links. Now Google is putting a stop to link manipulation and is employing sophisticated algorithms to detect non natural links.

What's next?

Certainly there will always be a cat and mouse game, but SEO is going to become so hard and complicated that it'll be too esoteric to bother with or worry about for anyone but the largest corporations who can hire teams of people to deal with it.

In my opinion, SEO is a temporary thing that only exists while SE's like Google completely get their act together. Once that happens, internet marketing will once again return to the fundamentals of making sites that people like, regardless of what's in the code, your keyword research or how much effort you've put into soliciting/buying links.

 

I agree that SEO will disappear for Black hats.

It will not disappear for White hats.

The Grey hats won't be as busy.

 

SEO is not just link building..
It includes unique content, optimizing and properly coding your sites.. -- And this is loved by all search engines.

Black hats will die.

 

Both Black & White hats will always co-exist. Just like the developers & hackers co-exits. So I don't that SEO will disappear & I think that only the terms will change

 

since the old times, paid links are black hats SEO. There are white hats and black hats, you must remember that. These white hats won't die as long as SEs not die.

 

you might want to read my blog-entry at
Future of Search Engine Optimization

and read the conclusion. Enjoy !

 

Don't think so.. Seo will never die.. And Black hat will not die also..

Every change or new stuff, in web business will bring the white hat methods along with black hat methods with it.. Not just seo but also in every business..

 

I'm not saying that black hats won't be able to achieve some success. The key is that at some point the costs will exceed the gains. It will then not be economical to practice black hat as a profession.

 

I don't think SEO will die. There will be sites making to the top of the SERPs, and they must be doing 'something' or had done 'something' to get there, so the sites below in the SERPs will always strive to get to the top. It is true that SEO will die for the Black Hats.

 

Brother just google search for the keyword "madison wisconsin real estate" and its showing "www.rapid-secured-loans.co.uk" url for past one month which is not related to the keyword what so ever. What does this mean to google algorithms.

 

More clarification on the ranking its in Page 2.

 

I think SEO will eventually disappear! I don't think so.

 

As long as organic searches exists.. SEO will never disappeared...

That's it...

 

SEO is a very competitive market, those who can achieve good positioning without using the blackhat methods will always find work imo.

Hopefully the SEs will keep improving their results, as this will get rid of the cowboys that just rip clients off and give the industry a bad name

 

That's right. I was reading an interview with a bod from an internet marketing company over here in the UK.

He said they follow the 20:40:40 rule.

20% is about the hardware such as getting the right server, 40% is about on-page optimisation and content and the other 40% is about off-page optimisation such as inbound links.

 

SEO could very well die. Again...if you read my blog-post (see above) you could see why.

There is a trend (BUZZZWORD.....) "web2.0" and it goes very well in the direction that content is even more important, sharing of content via social bookmarking etc..etc. That's where the focus is right now.

Besides SEO is all (ok, almost all) about G - so it depends what G will do in the near or far future, it even depends on the infrastructure of the web ITSELF. There might be developments in +/- 5 years we dont even know about.
It is VERY thinkable that primitve things like on-site SEO and link-building COULD lose any relevance in the future since importance of sites might be determined in a different way than today.

Look at how "web2.0" is "defined" (lol..actually it is NOT defined, its a really fuzzy term)...and compare to 5 years ago. Not that long ago noone knew what "social bookmarking" or "RSS" is...etc..etc...

Personally, i DO agree that PR is BS, it's unfair, LINKBUYING is BS and much, much other (still established) stuff is irrelevant because it just cant be that any 12 year old spammer can make a site, "adhere to SEO principles" and get rankings for some junk MFA site. From that point of view SEO is "wrong" and everyone can see G working on it, how they change their algoritms.

Same with "PR" and buying links....what BS (sorry ...) is that ? This effectively means that "PR" gives a seal to any site with "good PR"...while any new site which has NO PR is automatically irrelevant or bad ???? Or just calculated on the number of links in some irrelevant spammer-directories ?

WE DO that right now since we know it benefits us for rankings, but i am quite sure that G is not stupid and this will look VERY different sooner since there are some flaws in that whole system. Kind of....

The "perfect" and "real" SEO and relevancy of sites should REALLY only be in the content and not superficial things like how often a KW appears in whatever-H1 or H2 tag..give me a break <-- cant you see how retarded this is ?

 

Search Engine optimization will exist for as long as search engines exist. It will change priorities according to how the major engines change their algo, but webmasters are never going to just leave things to chance - nor should they. At it's best SEO works WITH search engines to help visitors find what they're looking for.

 

At minimum, I think the 40% on-page optimization part of the equation will disappear. Remember, Google's main goal is to bring searchers the content they most want to see. Any algorithm that rewards manipulating on-page code for the purpose of ranking higher is something that Google eventually wants to stamp out, and that's really what on-page SEO is. Mind you, I'm not talking about anything black hat here.

For example, let's say you have a site loaded with Flash and a site that's done in optimized HTML with CSS. Now let's say the Flash site has great content while the HTML site just has just good content. At present, it's likely that the HTML site will rank better, even though the content isn't as good. This is a result that Google doesn't want, and eventually their algorithms and methods will get good enough to make on-page stuff like Flash irrelevant.

In other words, on-page optimization is just taking advantage of Google's temporary inability to make ranking manipulation impossible.

 

In the future will have AI robots that will do all the SEO for us, so no SEO won't die its just humans won't be using it, robots will!

 

SEO will die once the concept of search-engines is death. I have some phantasies how the internet might look in, say, 20 years.

Do you still think that one search-engine will dtermine what site has relevancy and all people will use one or two SE ?

The web2.0 trend makes me think about many possibilites how the net might look in the future. Search engines might be totally dead, the internet/users behind it might be online in a total different way....maybe something like big, centralized portals similiar to major social bookmarking sites today already then "making" the internet...without the "need" to go on search engines anymore.

those portals might ultimately decide what is relevant for a user, according to his interests etc..etc....

SEO is basically helping SEARCH ENGINES to categorize stuff..and again then the people using those search engines. But there might be a time when search-engines are outdated and site/user/interest-relevancy might be determined in a total different way. (And not "dictated" by search engines)