Commentary
Searching For Some Integrity
- by Ryan DeShazer , March 16, 2011
I have to admit, I'm in a reflective and sentimental mood these days. Last month my wife and I welcomed our third child into the world. Mom and baby are both well; Dad's a happy camper, too. Moments like these are incredible in their ability to provide perspective on what's important in life. While I am often guilty of succumbing to the demands and pressures of agency life, the truth is I fight hard to keep a healthy work-life balance intact. I aspire to be a full-time husband and father first, professional search marketer a distant second.
During my short paternity leave away from the office, I found myself thinking about life's possibilities for my newborn son. The opportunities that will be open to him are limitless. As a parent, all that I can hope for is his health and happiness. My job as his father is to be a positive influence. I need to teach him to treat others with dignity, and to act with the utmost integrity in everything he does in life.
So with a not-so-subtle twist of irony, you might imagine my shock over recent headlines I encountered from around the search industry as I tried to catch up on news and reacclimate myself to work life:
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1. The New York Times runs a feature piece on JC Penney's black hat SEO tactics, which enabled the retailer to manipulate Search Google search results.
2. "Content farms" are denounced as polluting the web with thin content, and Google responds with its recent "Farmer" algorithm update.
These two stories both broke over the course of a few weeks, and in that short amount of time the industry that I have always been proud to be a part of started to look more like an online consortium of spammers and hoodlums. The room started to spin and my "work-life" balance quickly began to feel more like an episode of Dexter. Good guy by day, criminal by night.
The entire industry is now defending against serious reputation concerns, with very high stakes at play. Google in particular appears to be the most susceptible, given the New York Times' damaging piece on the vulnerabilities of its organic algorithm. Who knows how this will eventually play out, but a few questions that are top-of-mind for me include:
· Will consumers begin to question the results Google returns?
· What will be the lasting effect to the Google brand if the lay consumer has doubts about the credibility of top results?
· Will we see greater click through for listings further down the results?
· Will more users migrate to Bing or other search engine alternatives?
· Or will this act as a catalyst for a more rapid adoption of social search?
Another possibility is that people won't give a damn and things will remain status quo. But regardless of how this all nets out, the integrity of the search industry has come under fire. The ball is now in our collective courts, and how our industry responds to this adversity could potentially have long-standing ramifications on the viability of search marketing as we know it.
Consumers won't break the Google habit overnight, but if there's a chink in the armor, some disruptive force will certainly try to take advantage.
For me, I still have faith in the integrity of the search industry and know that there are far more practitioners grounded in the white hat fundamentals than are not. The headlines of these past few weeks are anomalies in the grand scheme. And if I'm to live up to my charge as father and role-model, the industry in which I operate can't be permanently marred by questionable ethics.
It's time for the good guys to prevail.
Well the Google results must always have been taken with a grain of salt. Partly because their algorithm is not as effective as it needs to be (hence leaving the door open for SEO) and because their need to fund themselves through paid advertising causes them to walk a tight rope. (Really, is "Find more Albert Einstein at Target" a truly relevant search result?) the process is continuously being refined, and users are becoming more adept at content development. In between is still a gray area that leaves the door open to manipulation and poor performance.
Congratulations on the birth of your son, Ryan. I agree with your comments and find that the lack of integrity is too often becoming the 'norm' these days -- no matter what the industry or position in life. The gray area between right and wrong has grown very deep and way too wide. Keep teaching your children that 'white hat' philosophy!
I'm not convinced the layman knows the difference. All sorts of studies show that 1 in 3 don't know the difference between paid search and organic; poll 10 people off the street and I bet only one knows what SEO is; and none know what a content farm is. We have a different view as industry insiders. However, I do believe the search market will change dramatically due to social search; but not for the issue of SEO and content farms.
Hmm. In regard to consumer confidence in Google, I think those of us in the search industry live in a bit of a bubble: JC Penny and Overstock may have made it into the mainstream media, but in a very flash-in-the-pan fashion. I'd bet big bucks that the vast majority of Google users either haven't heard of the debacles, or cursorily digested and then excreted the information. That is, I agree with "people won't give a damn and things will remain status quo" in your list of possibilities. Ultimately users care most about the quality of their results (and quality results are what Google cares about too, not just because they've stated it, but because it's fully in their best interests).
As to hopping to Bing, that won't happen on a major scale unless (again) the overall relevancy of Bing results are at least as good as Google's. And the other leak of SEO news in the mainstream - Panda/Farmer - probably only cements Google's reputation as a spam-fighting search engine.
Your faith in the integrity of the search industry is touching, but I'm afraid I don't share it. Not because search marketers have inherently worse or better morals than those in other industries (except the financial services industry - *everybody* has better morals than those guys:), but because in any unregulated industry they'll always be practitioners that bend or break the rules if can be beneficial to do so. And by "unregulated" I mean *totally* unregulated: there is are no government or other external regulations surrounding search marketing, and there's no industry body that has even a recommended code of ethics, let alone a regulatory framework (i.e. enforceable rules). The closest any search marketer can come public discipline is by being outed for their bad practices, as being punished in the SERPs isn't public unless you happen to be tracking the ranking fortunes of a specific site, or sites using a particular SEO or SEO agency (if a ranking falls in the forest...).
Or, to rephrase my earlier statement, SEO practitioners can't bend or break the rules because there are none. One could consider Google's webmaster guidelines "rules" I suppose but, again, reputations are rarely impacted by violating these guidelines, where they are even uncovered.
I don't think my assessment is gloomy, though. "Ethical" search marketers (the majority) will continue to work alongside "unethical" search marketers, just as they always have. As in so many professions, those with integrity will on average do better in the long run than those without, however much those without may continue to be rewarded for their efforts.
Marilee - Thanks very much for the kind words. :)
Daniel - Excellent adds, thanks very much. Really my thinking here was whether a NY Times piece on SEO was enough to reach the layman. True story - my father called me after that piece ran to warn me that people were able to manipulate search results! He was shocked, and I had to explain that this type of thing happens all the time -- just not typically exposed on such a public stage.
Aaron - Thanks too for your comments. Read my response to Daniel. I'm not delusional about my importance to the world, being a SEM; am just curious if a prominent story on NY Times is enough for people to stop and question the results they're presented. If this were to have any negative impact, the logical evolution seems to be a more rapid adoption of Social Search. Thanks too for the Twitter follow and tweet to this article.