It should not be possible, in the 2020s, for PR companies who have nothing to do with writing content, to increase the visibility of that content in the web search results. SEO, has to go.
Never does a day go by without some privileged and entitled soul on social media bitterly complaining about being “cancelled”. Stripped of their vast priority status and dumped into the mosh pit of desperate attention-begging with everyone else. After years of being idolised, they issue a monumentally bigoted comment, and the public suddenly wonders why this horrible, self-serving manipulator ever gained such affection in the first place.
Through the window left by the de-throned “influencer”, the public now sees better people, and thinks: why couldn’t we find this altogether more pleasant and giving world before?
The answer? It’s human nature to take whatever first appears in view. We’re lazy. We’re not going to spend time looking harder when we think we’ve already found the best of what’s available.
And it’s the same with search engines. We assume that the top results in a web search are going to be the best results, and we accept them, because why bother to go any deeper if the best comes up at the top?
The problem is, the best doesn’t come up at the top. That’s not how Google works. What comes up at the top, is the material that shows the most meticulously “correct” observation of Google’s mechanical grading algorithms.
It’s possible for you, right now, to trawl through a huge mountain of tutorial matter explaining how these grading algorithms work, how to placate them, how to game them. Typically, in a 5,000-word epic on SEO, approximately one sentence will be dedicated to the issues of creativity and content quality. The rest will be long-winded, graph-accompanied documentations of link-building strategy, email outreach strategy, this strategy, that strategy… It’s business.
At the centre of Google’s search visibility rating system is the so-called backlink. If you’re the one publishing the content, that’s a link from a third party site, to your site. The original idea was that if third party sites are linking to your site, your content must be popular, and thus good. So Google made that a chief indicator in the grading of content quality. That was in the 1990s.
But despite the fact that cheats have consistently and relentlessly exploited this system to push unworthy material into highly visible search positions, it’s still a chief indicator today. Google has just made the system more and more conditional. That hasn’t stopped the cheating. It’s just driven it underground, into the email system, where “go-getters” mount outreach campaigns to persuade third parties to link to them. Or their clients - because as I say, this is business.
An entire science now surrounds these backlinks, and it gets complicated. But even today, the general rule of SEO is still that the more Google-approved backlinks you can get, the more visible you become in the search results. Why is something that Google knows very well is being gamed, still the frontline measure of content status?
Is it not time to cancel SEO?
Not just the backlinks bit. The whole lot. Cancel the preferential ranking of sites, which is still allowing news and media domains to publish three-sentence non-stories and automatically place near the top of Page 1. Cancel topical requirements, which force web publishers to avoid straying from a narrow niche if they want to retain their visibility. Cancel penalty culture, which allows publishers to inflict search profile damage on a rival site. These are things that are only able to exist because of the stupid, unfair and way-outdated means by which web content is prioritised by search engines.
WHY IS GOOGLE’S SEARCH PRIORITY SYSTEM UNFAIR?
Google’s search priority system is unfair to the general public, because it doesn’t deliver them the best work, and very often it delivers extremely poor and lazy work. That’s no surprise, since publishers are expending so much effort “reaching out” to third parties by email, and in some cases spending so much money bribing them, that they have barely any resources left for the actual content.
It’s also unfair to publishers, because it gives priority to go-getters as opposed to talent. It’s the usual discrimination in favour of the extrovert, at the expense of the introvert. And since introverts are routinely more creative and thorough than extroverts, this is not in the public interest either.
Google knows more than anyone that the driving force of modern SEO is so-called “email outreach”. Go-getters emailing owners and admins of other sites, badgering for backlinks to their own sites. And because these go-getters are often using artificial motivations (like giving bloggers free goods for a ‘review’ with a link, or exchanging social media shares for links), the quality of the page content does not need to be a factor. This is why the top results on search engines are still so often of mediocre, skimpy or of low quality, or refer to sites that offer an extremely bad user experience.
The system also favours people with money. i.e. those who can afford to pay PR companies or specialised SEO operations to do their “email outreach” for them. From any angle, it should not be possible, in the 2020s, for PR companies who have nothing to do with writing content, to increase the visibility of that content in the organic web search results. But the advantage it gives to wealth is the most sour element of all. Once you let wealth dictate organic visibility, you’re potentially trampling out the voices of the marginalised and vulnerable, and allowing privilege to speak for them.
Perhaps the most obvious unfairness with the Google system is the way high-ranking sites can spin articles from low-ranking sites, and then outrank them in the search results. If you write an article, and Google finds and indexes it, it should not be possible for someone with more “search presence” to rock up, re-write your post (but with less flair) and then place above you in search. But this happens all the time. A news site can outrank you just by copying your title – they don’t even need any meaningful content in the post. The power Google automatically awards to their domain means that they can basically publish “empty posts” and still win premium visibility.
This happens because of a hierarchical system of content priority which has nothing to do with the quality or originality of an individual piece of work. It's really now a legacy system, because it originated in the 1990s. But it's still in frontline use. And again, it’s bad for the public, because big sites with derivative, more mechanical, and skimpier material, trample smaller sites with original, more vibrant, and more substantial material out of view.
It also means the public are more often being referred to sites written and run by people who care less about the subject matter, and can’t provide any direct response to queries. Small sites, created by enthusiasts, can often be a great resource for answering specific questions. But if no one can find them…
HOW SHOULD SEARCH RESULTS BE PRIORITISED?
With search priority, there has to be a content-first ethos. And while an easy-to-game indicator like backlinks reigns supreme over content priority, there is no content-first ethos. While SEO knowledge has more bearing than research investment or creativity on the visibility of content, there is no content-first ethos. While a rival publisher can devise a scheme to sabotage the online visibility of your work, there is no content-first ethos. This. Should. Be. About. Content. Nothing else.
So what would a content-first ethos look like? It wouldn’t necessarily need to look that much different from the way it looks at the moment. Google already has a wide-reaching framework for measuring public reaction to content, and analysing content for originality, substance, etc. It knows which pages are user-friendly.
So it’s not that Google doesn’t have other, more reliable information upon which to base its priority system. It is, in my opinion, that Google actually likes the idea of go-getters ranking highest. It likes the idea of people with a business mentality perfoming better in search than those with a creative mentality.
Whilst I don’t expect Google will cease its heavy reliance on backlinks, topical restriction, automatic site hierachy and penalty culture as measures of priority, it should not be considered a source of the internet’s best content until it does. In many instances, Twitter provides a more productive search than Google. And whilst Twitter does incorporate a search engine, that’s not what it was designed to be. Twitter does not require its users to perform search engine optimisation, and we can all still find what we're looking for. Surely, if Google cancelled SEO, its results could not be any worse?