Is the future of SEO in trouble?
January 14th, 2009 | by geo |Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basically means optimizing your site so that it appears on the first page of major search engines such as Google & Yahoo, when someone searches for your content.
It’s a big business, with SEO firms making several thousand per month per site to optimize them by making sure the right keywords are in place, content, links etc.. all the tricks of the trade to get your site #1 on google search.
That’s all great, but how does this work when Google now allows users to rank search results according to personal preferences? When logged into Google, which I am everyday, if you do a search you can rate up or down the results and it is stored for future searches. My prediction is this will become a common theme on all search sites, and that this is just the baby steps to personalized search results every time. There are also new products such as surf canyon which has decent reviews for personalized search.
So, my question to the SEO folks is how in the world can you guarantee high rankings when results become personalized? This is going to hurt some of the sites that simply have good SEO but poor content, and help those sites with little or no SEO and good content.
At the end of the day it’s good for the users which is most important. I do think though that SEO firms are going to have to battle with some clients seeing less traffic and “poorer” results because of the human filter 
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2 Responses to “Is the future of SEO in trouble?”
By chuck on Jan 14, 2009 | Reply
“This is going to hurt some of the sites that simply have good SEO but poor content, and help those sites with little or no SEO and good content.”
I don’t see how this is a bad thing.
I don’t want some site showing up on the first page of my results because they pay thousands a month to some optimization company to appear there. I’d rather the site be there based on providing valuable content for the search term I used.