The SEO Industry Is A Scam Designed To Shield Google And Rob Old Ladies
The origins of SEO are not altruistic or well-intentioned. Early SEO was used as a way to subvert search results and trick search engines into ranking crappy, undeserving scam content over better things people might actually want.
This started an arms race, with legitimate publishers forced to adopt those same tactics in order to compete against dishonest scammers.
The SEO industry was then created to sell weapons to both sides.
Search Engines Should Have Saved Us From SEO
If the search engines, of which Google was only one minor player amongst many at the time, had been any good at their job they could have put a stop to the whole thing right then and there. SEO should never have been necessary if they were doing what they were supposed to be doing.
Search engines should have been the ones combatting those spammers, but they didn’t do a good job of it, forcing legitimate publishers to buy SEO weapons so they could take matters into their own hands.
Whether those early search engines failed out of incompetence or intention is anyone’s guess, but in the end, it was the inability of search engines to distinguish good content from bad that allowed the SEO industry to flourish.
SEO Sells Weapons To Both Sides
SEO has never been about helping the good guys, though. They need the bad guys to succeed or there’d be no reason for the good guys to hire them. So it should surprise no one that the SEO industry is as much a scam as the scammers it purports to help legitimate publishers fight against. If those scammers were ever actually defeated, the SEO industry would cease to exist.
Google has now made a move to make the SEO industry irrelevant. Unfortunately, it’s not a move that helps people the SEO industry preys on. Instead, Google has given up on the idea of being a search engine and has shifted its business model to one that seems to rank content based largely on who its most important corporate partners are.
Google’s Move To Wipe Out The SEO Industry
I recently attended Google’s Creator Conversation Event, where they may have accidentally revealed this as their intention.
A fellow attendee asked Google’s engineers a simple question. I’ve changed the names to protect the innocent, but in basic substance, it was this.
Why does Nike rank #1 for the query “Best Running Shoes” instead of a list written by an independent, unbiased reviewer?
We expected the answer to be something like, “Oh, we’re working on that. Our algorithm just hasn’t figured it out.” Instead, the answer we got was this:
If we rank a small publisher ahead of a big brand, won’t they get mad?
From that response, Google’s primary concern would seem to be ordering results to please powerful corporations.
In that environment, SEO ceases to have value for small publishers. No amount of SEO can make your website a powerful corporation.
Twenty independent publishers attended Google’s Creator Conversation Event. Most of them spent $10,000 – $50,000 each, hiring the most well-known and well-respected SEO consultants on the internet to help them solve their problems. Not one of them got any positive results, despite the fact that Google confirmed all of these sites were good and didn’t have any real problems.
If SEO consultants can’t help sites, Google already likes, what hope is there that they might help someone else? None.
Why SEO Pros Must Continue Protecting Google, Even While It Destroys Them
It’s why you’ll see SEO professionals defending Google from accusations that they favor big brands. They have to shield the world’s biggest search engine because if people realize the truth, they no longer have a business model.
If there’s a future for SEO, it’s probably working for those big corporations and trying to help them find some edge to outrank other big corporations. If you’re Reebok and you want to outrank Nike, then there might be some level of SEO that could help you get there.
The rest of the SEO industry has been relegated to bottom feeders praying on the innocent and the elderly after Google’s recent moves. Their only client base is now people who don’t know any better. Maybe that’s what it was all along.
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