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Is Google Trying to Put SEO’s Out of Business?

Google has adjusted its overall search result rules yet again. This time, the results seem to weigh in favor of Google+ and against traditional SEO strategies — a shift which has some SEO pros (along with competing social media platforms and anti-trust regulators) seeing red.

“Search Plus Your World” (SPYW or Search+) is the name that Google has given to a feature that not only includes but actually gives preference to personally relevant results in any given Google search. According to The Official Google Blog:

“Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships”

Sounds very nice, but one can’t help noticing that ‘personalized results’ tend to give plenty of Google+ results. Facebook and Twitter are only the most well-known of social sites that have been left out of the results (in Google’s explanation, because they refused to have their data scanned). So any Google search will look for matching terms among people, businesses, and comments within Google+, and highlight them at the very top of the first page.

In other words, Google seems to be handing themselves (and their preferred partners) the ‘golden ring’ that SEOs work so hard to deliver to clients — not to mention creating serious concerns about anti-competitive practices, for which the company has been investigated, warned, and censured numerous times.

“The big questions for me are around regulation and government actions,” says Randy Fishkin of SEOMoz. “If Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and others rally their lobbying forces, we could see a serious challenge to how Google’s allowed to operate and leverage search to promote their own properties.”

Granted, one can easily see classic ‘non-personal’ results simply by not signing in, hitting the “hide personal results” button on the top right of the results page, or switching the service off completely in your Options menu (at the far right of the black Google bar). But critics assert that any of these steps are too much to ask, and that Google is abusing its position to push its own social networking platform.

This is merely the latest Google change that negatively affects traditional SEO strategies. After the 2010 “May Day” algorithm change and the following year’s “Panda” update, many SEO professionals began to feel that Google was specifically trying to freeze them out. Later in 2011, Google’s embrace of more privacy and secure browsing via SSL and HTTPS Everywhere sparked serious criticism from SEO pros who observed that referrer data was being lost for most, but preserved for Google’s clients.

Indeed, one “search engine guru” in particular — Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land — calls Google’s behavior throughout 2011 “alarming” and “a big step back.”

“Increasingly over the years, search engines — Google in particular — have given more and more support to SEOs and publishers,” Sullivan writes. “But 2011 marked the first significant reversal that I can recall, with both linking and keyword data being withheld.”

One must raise the objection that Google is simply attempting to deliver higher-quality organic results, and that it is precisely the efforts of SEOs (from the whitest hat to the blackest) that have forced Google to penalize certain practices — to tilt the search result ‘playing field’ back toward useful web sites, rather than simply those that know how to play the SEO game. And most seasoned SEO pros understand that change and progress is not simply to be expected but embraced.

“SEOs wedded to old style strategies are less likely to welcome Search+,” says Andrew Girdwood of Big Mouth Media. “SEOs who have evolved to a multi-signal approach, who already work with engaging content and encouraging social and other signals are in a strong position to do well. All SEOs will now have to work with clients to help produce the sort of content that will do well in Google’s new world.”

But the real danger is not a level playing field, but one that may be tilted too far in Google’s direction. Harvard Professor Ben Edelman makes a strong case that anything with Google’s name on it is a far surer bet than any SEO when it comes to moving up the search rankings.

“I’ve found more than a dozen Google services receiving favored placement in Google search results,” writes Edelman. “Some have developed into solid products with loyal users. Others are far weaker. But each enjoys a level of favored placement in Google search results that other services can only dream of.”

“Certainly myriad sites added Google +1 buttons (giving Google both data and real estate) not because they genuinely wanted Google buttons on their sites, but because they feared others would overtake them in search results if they failed to employ Google’s newest service.”

Author bio: Darren Bradley is a SEO professional who writes for deals.servicebundles.com which helps supply people with FiOS Internet. If you would like to learn more, click here.