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The Last Days Of SEO

Though he's hardly the first to do so, Richard Tofel, an author and general manager at ProPublica, is predicting the demise of search engine optimization. In essence, "SEO itself is an inefficiency, a transaction cost rather than a value-creator -- it is a technique designed entirely to compensate for the failure of the search engine to correctly analyze site content, searcher desire, or both," Tofel explains.

"Over time, economics teaches us, inefficiencies tend to be wrung out, and transaction costs reduced." At some point in the not-too-distant future, Tofel believes that new technology will help searchers find exactly the content they're searching for. Also of note, Tofel suggests that AOL's acquisition of The Huffington Post will likely represent a watershed moment in the history of search, as he believes that much of HuffPo's $300-million-plus in value is tied up in its mastery of modern SEO.

Read the whole story at Nieman Lab »

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