Google Growth Has Peaked - What is an SEO to do?

Craig Hordlow of Red Bricks Media has been working on an interesting idea. He believes that Google search is slowing down as destination sites continue to grow. These destination sites include wikipedia, facebook, myspace, craigslist, yelp, youtube etc. You can read more about his theory on his Mostly SEO Blog . I agree completely with his theory, but I will take it one step further.

Destination sites will continue to grow in popularity. The question is why do they continue to grow? Is it because of their specialization in specific verticals? My theory is that people are migrating to destination sites because it is a way to minimize junk, clutter, and noise that is usually associated with search results. As Google search results continue to be cluttered with spam, people will flee to trusted sites as a way to filter out spam results.

I think similar to how cable television created a market for premium ad free content, destination sites are doing the same thing. What these new destination sites have to do is make sure to be true to their customer base. Entry is so easy on the internet that alienating your customer base will have devastating results. A good example is Facebook Beacon incident. Publishers need to really step it up and hold out without selling out to ads. I believe that in the near future people will be willing to spend money for premium content once again.

What does this all mean for SEO? For someone who works in this field it is definitely something that irks me. The industry is so young and already it seems that in 5 years telling people “I can make you rank on Google” might be a worthless proposition. Not an ideal situation to say the least. However, call me crazy, but I am optimistic about this outlook.

SEO needs to start using different terminology in order to keep the industry alive. For example, we can start with changing the term Search Engine Optimization. It seems to me it is far too limiting a name for someone who can make your product visible to hundreds of people online. Maybe we should start calling it Online Search Optimization.

Another term that I despise in SEO is “rankings”. Any hack SEO can make someone rank number 1 for a term with no competition and little search volume. Yet, all our clients seem to use it as a benchmark for success. I would like to get rid of it completely and focus on things like traffic, ROI, conversion, etc. Also, I think we need to get away from metrics developed by Pay Per Click. These metrics continue to propagate Google agenda of becoming the dominant advertising platform online.

We should talk about how findable our clients products and services are. There are other methods of gaining visibility that are in the SEO realm that do not involve ranking on Search Engines. Although, this blog does not perform as well as I had hoped, maybe because my writing sucks and I never proof read anything, I get about 10 visitors a day. All of that traffic comes from other blogs and websites, including comments I left, references, etc. I do not rank in Google for “google sucks” and yet putting one comment on the Times Blog regarding Facebook drew in over 200 visitors in one day.

To sum up the points of this long winded article: Google Search Sucks causing people to migrate more to “destination sites,” SEO needs to start using new jargon and nomenclature to continue to thrive despite this trend, and this blog sucks :)