Alan DraperWith Google it’s never abundantly clear whether they hate ‘SEOs’ or whether they simply tolerate them.
Recently Googles own Matt Cutts announced that they would be taking a ‘close’ look at Guest Posts. His harsh tone toward this popular way of link building suggests to me at least that Google dislike any attempt made to manipulate their search by SEOs. Whether you’re adding value to the web or not.
While Google are certainly well within their own rights to do this it is becoming abundantly clear that their regular algorithm changes are far more than just a war on black hat SEOs and are simply a war against SEOs generally.
A company whose revenue is so heavily reliant on advertising and facing more and more competition from PPC and now CPA advertising on the Facebook platform and not to mention other social networks they may be trying to protect their bottom-line. As a business it makes sense that any company wants to stack the odds in favor of their own services.
I am a huge fan of Google and I don’t mean to paint a bad picture of them but in my own personal opinion this is what is happening.
With the news that Google have acquired ‘Deep Mind’ a UK AI startup for $500 Million this could be one of their biggest acquisitions that will change the way search works forever.
The team from Deep Mind will join Ray Kurzweil who has publicly stated that his own mission is to build a search engine so advanced it could work like a ‘cybernetic friend’.
We’ve already seen that Google have made search more specific to the individual. Anyone with a Google account knows this and not to mention the introduction of local search listings which have started to give us all a very personalized search result which may be different based on your location and your own searching habits.
Bringing in a startup like Deep Mind to their team means that Google are vigorously pursuing this type of search. Undoubtedly a good thing in the long run and giving people the information that they truly need it could mean the beginning of the end of SEO as we know it.
There will be a general decline and perhaps we’re already seeing the general decline of the effectiveness of SEO but over the next few years it may become abundantly clear that SEO is a dying art.
Making their search engine even more intelligent to the point of AI is certainly following in the footsteps of Hummingbird and turning search into more of an answers engine than a ‘search engine’.
While I’m sure there will be far more uses in the works for the technology behind Deep Mind than just improving search and I don’t doubt that if you’re a paying customer you will always be able to circumvent the future updates and get in front of whatever audience that you like. I believe that as time goes by search will be so intelligent that there are just far too many ranking factors for us to understand or optimize for… Especially when in the future we’re all going to be getting personalized search results that vary from searching habits, location, age, device and more.
What are your thoughts on the Google acquisition of Deep Mind?
Is this the end of SEO as we know it or will SEO continue to exist in changing forms as it always has done?
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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You haven’t really explained what Deep Mind will do for Google or how it will affect search, but for half a billion it must be good!
Change is only permanent in life and SEO is no exception. There is no end to SEO, it will continue to exist in different forms, may be, the old seo techniques is not going to work anymore. SEOs should know how to update themselves to the latest algorithmic changes, apply strategies that are still effective and go on.