Today’s blog has not been optimised for Search Engines

Search Engine Optimisation is an unusual art.  Do you remember the days when you would do a web search and the first page you would click on would simply be a list of all the words you could think of that just happened to include your search terms.  Nowadays of course you can present a website of any sort of content and then simply put your wordlist in the metatags; a mild improvement.  I recently started ditching my independent websites when one of them, a wiki, was taken over by what must have been content introduced by bots.  I assume it was bots because otherwise someone really had too much time on their hands and too little talent to spend it creating anything original.  I am sure there was some esoteric reason for filling up gigabytes of space with complete garbage but I have no idea what it was.   Of course, filling up gigabytes of space with complete garbage is a trade for some people, usually attached to an income from advertising.  A recent trend has been to draw in people with click bait, such as ‘you will never believe the totally amazing thing that this girl does with her swimming costume’, ‘List of the top ten most awesome ways to get your perfect job’ or ‘Scientists discover that using toothpaste has been linked to death in your sleep’.  Most of the times the titles are misleading, not totally amazing, not difficult to believe, etc.  People still click on them though and for that reason the web is becoming overwhelmed with them, especially when the popularity of a link is part of what pushes it up the search rankings to make it more easily visible and therefore more often clicked so that the problem self perpetuates.   A lot of the time the people writing these articles are probably talented writers but like everyone else in the modern world have had to put their ethics and morals to one side in order to obey rules blindly in the short term rush to grab profits.  Websites claiming to be focussed on business are likely to be doing top tens of skimpiest bathing costumes and websites claiming to be focussed on technology are writing misleading headlines that show a complete misunderstanding of an underlying scientific discovery.   The overall effect is a lowering of quality on the internet.  Little wonder that newspapers are disappearing behind paywalls when they find that their quality journalism is being ignored 9 times out of ten by people who have latched onto a ridiculous story that looks like it should have been printed in the Sunday Sport or the Enquirer.  Little wonder that the quality of journalism in the quality press is also dropping.  There are a few quality magazines/papers left and they seem to be as big in paper as they are on the web.  To be on the web is a great way to become lost in an electronic forest amongst the noise of a billion digital trees of rapidly changing cultural memes.  There is no way to really know what will rise to the surface but in general it will be whichever items have made the greatest use of SEO.   Things will change though.  Just like the height of SEO sophistication at the turn of the century was to simply fill a webpage with the contents of a dictionary, we will find that the tricks being utilised today will eventually be picked apart by advanced search algorithms.  Even using a few fresh ideas of how to aim searches could radically alter the way in which we search the web.  As computers become better at filtering out the garbage a lot of the unworthy rubbish that wastes our time will begin to disappear.  Even learning to really use the search boxes in our browsers a little better could allow us to banish a lot of the things that annoy us.   In ten years we may be able to create our own filter bubbles to let us see only the things we want to see.  Much like we can now ask Google to show web results or news results or video results perhaps we will be able to set up our own advanced tabs where we simply click once and suddenly all the cats in boxes are gone and they have taken with them all the candidates for America’s funniest home videos and every mention of what Miley Cyrus did last week.  We can already have a lot of control with advanced search on Google.  Some of the other search engines also offer differing degrees of control but it all takes trouble and thought to craft every search. One day all the trouble that has been take with choosing all the right SEO terms and putting in links to pertinent places may all have been for nothing.  In the short term the sites have certainly gotten the attention they wanted but maybe the tarmac of dross that covers the surface of the internet will begin to crack as weeds start to find their way through into your searches, soon grasses and trees will start to push the tarmac apart and maybe the dross will be replaced by a flourishing ecosystem of information and data, the way the internet should have been, the kind of internet that can change the world.  Perhaps this blog might even be read by some people then instead of them spending their time watching Ray William Johnson telling a dick joke.   Today’s post was inspired by this page from ClickZ – http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2354997/is-seo-dead