The End Of Seo? Options

[IdanDone]

After I read the article "Google Continues To Test A Search Interface That Looks More Like Digg Every Day" (Techrunch) I understood that SEO as we know it may disappear someday and to tell you the truth maybe it's good for all of us.

In the new Google interface people will affect the results, recommend websites and add their own comments.
I don't know how it is going to work, but I believe is the right thing to do, because today SEO experts are increasing and they know how to cheat Google algorithm and you know what... sometimes the SERP smell like a smart robot ranked them.

John lennon knew what would happen and wrote the song: "Power to the people"! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/oldfogey.gif)

[nethy]

yep. time to go home.

[Shannon Lilly]

SEO will never end, it may change face but never end (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[kennethlouiep]

SEO will always help and provide guidelines and principles for the beginners in blog-making and website designing. SEO will not end.

[SEMSEO]

The end of SEO is near! The search engines are becoming perfect. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/girl_cray2.gif)

[torka]

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/hysterical.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/hysterical.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/hysterical.gif)

--Torka (IMG:style_emoticons/default/mf_prop.gif)

[Misscj]

Do you think that maybe more personalised results may add a new dimension to SEO rather than bring an end to it?

Of course, a lot of people have google accounts of some kind, adwords, gmail, and more. So we are signed in and results can easily be influenced by your history, search habits, votes on relevancy and what interests you personally, and all sorts of other things. There will always still be the original, "clean" rankings, uninfluenced by this. Maybe a lot less traffic will come from these, but anyway I don't think SEO is all about rankings. Traffic can now come from a variety of sources we didn't have before like social media for example. That's part of the SEO job, getting the site to have visibility and gain in authority through this even and many other sources. Even personalised search is going to give you results from the "clean" results, then you will manipulate them. SEO becomes about appealing to the user, and coming up in those results to start with.

There is a lot of work, and that's just a little part of it.

[Randy]

Do you think that maybe more personalised results may add a new dimension to SEO rather than bring an end to it?

Yes, but not for the reasons most would think.

What will become more important are the exact things we've been preaching around here for years. The main one being that you need to understand who are target audience is and try to tailor everything towards these people.

To give you an example, let's say your site was one that provides information or resources to a user that would generally fall into a segment known as Teachers. If your site and link campaign were designed to cater to this market segment it would make sense that your site might get an additional boost up the SERPs when someone whose user profile fit the Teacher/Educator searched Google for your phrases. Whereas other sites in the same market space that were less focused would suffer.

There will still be #1 ranking sites and so on, but they'll change depending upon how much Google knows about the individual doing the search. If they know nothing it'll default back to the original, non-personalized rankings. The more they know about the user, the more personalized their results will be.

If anything SEO will become more important, especially for smaller or newer sites. Because done right these types of sites will be better able to compete with those competitors who are too spread out and not very well focused.