Is SEO a fading influence for marketing porn?
A few days ago, Jeremy Schoemaker made a post entitled ‘SEO has no future‘. This, of course, got him a load of comments and a nice place on the social bookmarking pages.
The basis of his argument was that in Google’s push to remain ‘the’ search engine, it always had to find new ways to make searches relevant and was, therefore, always on the lookout for ways to prevent SEO ‘tweaks’ from bringing sites to the front page which were not of real relevance to the search in question. This is a quote from his blog entry:
“Googles combination of SEO and social voting via toolbar/history/analytics will continue to sway more in the realm of social voting.”
Schoemaker’s post had already drawn 160 comments when I arrived on his blog, and these will no doubt continue to increase. Many commentators criticised his article for being link bait and light weight and, in my opinion, that is exactly what it was.
However, it gave many bloggers fodder for their next blog posts.
Garry Conn, in a post entitled ‘Can Google SEO and Social Bookmarking Coexist?‘ extended the argument proposed by Jeremy Schoemaker, agreeing with him and saying that, when you think about all the ’search tools’ Google provides for the surfer, it would not be not surprising if Google used that data to help their search facilities.
He gives the example of Google Web History as one of these resources. Now, I use Google to search with, but I am not a great lover of the ‘Big G’ when it comes to my personal privacy, so I do not subscribe to many ‘Big G experiences’ apart from Reader, Analytics and Mail, so I only had a very tentative look at Google Web History without signing anything. The first page just gave me details of all my recent searches through Google. Not that informative, as I only search when I have no ready link to go to (but I am not a ‘typical’ searcher it has to be said).
To go any further, I would have had to sign up to Expand’ my web history and I didn’t fancy that, so I had a look at the ‘Privacy FAQ for Web History’ page. This is what I found :
“Web History uses the information from your web history or other information you provide us to improve your Google search experience, such as improving the quality of your search results and providing recommendations. In addition to enabling the Web History functionality, the information we collect when you use Web History may be shared among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services.”
In other words BigG is snooping on us to ensure that he stays top of the search tree. I knew most of this already. I just needed to check out that nothing had changed - for the better anyhow. Nothing had.
So I wasn’t surprised that Garry Conn said about BigG’s use of your web history:
“Google follows your trends, they know what your favorite web sites are, they look for patterns in your surfing habits such as the time of day you commonly check your email and they know what your primary interests are based off the different blogs, pages and sites you visit.”
Garry went on to expand his theme with reference to Google Notebook, Google Subscribed Links, Google Bookmarks, Reader, and so on, to come up with the argument that, as we can see in the Privacy Policy that Google can use this information to ‘enhance our search experience’, then surely it is feasable to suggest that, although that same policy doesn’t give them a mandate to sell the info to third parties, there is nothing to stop Google using those details to improve its main index.
He goes on to argue that we need to use all these tools because:
‘the content you are adding into your iGoogle account most likely will be good content as most end users are not going to want to crap up their own personal accounts with junk and garbage’.
So, he argues that the guys at BigG will recognise this. Therefore it will be a useful way for them to find reliable search results.
Wake up Garry. Smart adult webmasters have been doing this for some time. We have been adding our blogs’ feeds to our ‘G’ reader (as well as to Yahoo’s), and to notebook and bookmarks The idea being that anything on BigG is likely to be used in their analysis material at some time, so it might as well be our stuff they use. So this argument is not new.
I am not sure that I agree with where Garry takes us next, however:
So, in order to make the G machine think we are good enough for searching, we need to do all these things, but we have to do them in such a way which allows us to maintain a good standing order “in the many various networks”.
In other words, he is arguing that for site and blog owners who want to keep their credibility and trust (which, I agree, is very important), they ensure that the content they add to social bookmarking sites is not spam or overt marketing.
This, he appears to argue, is why social bookmarking sites and the sites they lead to will be assessed by ‘Google to further enhance their search facilities.
Hasn’t this guy heard about having more than one social bookmarking account for all these sites?
And are the analysts at Google really that stupid not to have realised that this is exactly what marketers (porn and mainstream) are doing already?
The argument of the two bloggers mentioned above was basically for giving more importance to Social Bookmarking than to ‘SEO tactics’. Neither of them denied SEO a place, but stated that it was increasingly clear that doing things like tweaking your title tags and ensuring your <h1> tags were in order will not be enough in the future.
But this hasn’t been the case for a long time. I know only some SEO and still have loads to learn, but to dismiss its importance and its breadth in order to make a shallow argument in favour of ‘maintaining your credibility’ on Social Bookmarking sites is not only link bait, it’s irresponsible nonsense to tell anyone who is just beginning to try to make money online.
And one very important person seems to have been omitted from all of this - the average surfer.
Does the average surfer looking for porn, or any other product online, go to social bookmarking sites first? I don’t think so.
Would the average surfer necessarily like the ‘recommendations’ offered at StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, furl, et al, or saved by more experienced web surfers in their Google Bookmarks?
Does the average surfer even bother to click on the link to his or her Web History? I don’t think so. Neither do I think that the surfer looking for porn is likely to save his or her preferences on a ‘Web History’ site which cannot guarantee full privacy even if they do bother to click on that link.
The guys at Google are smart. Sure, they will use any analysis they can get their hands on, which is why it is important to have links to all your porn sites and blogs within their system. But surely they would not allow social bookmarking findings to influence them so much they make scant regard to other factors which are already tried and continually updated?
When it comes right down to it, Google has got where it is today by being smart and keeping one step ahead of the opposition. Giving in to the hype of the social bookmarking/web 2.0 crowd will not increase their ability to provide good search material to the average surfer and the guys at BigG know this.
SEO may be a pain in the butt to get right, but it is not going to go away. Social bookmarking is an addition - a way to try to ‘tip the scales a little more in your favour’, but it will never, in my opinion, take over from good SEO knowledge when it comes to trying to make lots of money when you market porn online.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment