Background of SEO

No More Need to Trash the Flash
By Kalena Jordan in Kalena Jordan's Blog
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Google has delighted web designers the world over with the announcement that they are now indexing Adobe Flash files better than ever before.

Google can now index any kind of textual content embedded in Flash files. They can also discover URLs. From the official Google blog post:

“Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?

All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.”

The new algorithm was made possible thanks to Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library:

“We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.”

http://www.sitepronews.com/2008/08/25/no-more-need-to-trash-the-flash/

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very difficult, but it will soon get much, much worse.

Six years ago you could easily count the firms doing SEO work. The number of sites competing for each search term were fewer, and the state of the art spamming tricks centered on white-on-white text and multiple title tags. Getting a top ranking out of the 50,000 results returned was relatively easy to accomplish because those 50k results were most often poorly optimized. Getting into the top 10 meant being in the top 0.02% of the 50k results, which is certainly not trivial, but easily accomplished when facing naive competition. With a little effort site owners could do it themselves.

Now the tip of the iceberg is larger. Time has caused two things to happen: the SEO competition is trickier than 6 years ago, and the population of web sites is larger. There are now around 250,000 results for most 2-word searches, and the new sites are often tuned by SEO practitioners. Instead of needing to be in the top 0.02%, you now need to be in the top 0.005% of a more competitive group of pages. Such rankings are still possible, but beyond the ability of most site owners. You still need to be in the top 0.008% of all sites to be top 10.

But now we see that it is truly the tip of an iceberg. What we have never before seen is a massive amount of hidden content that previously resided behind the barriers inherent to dynamic content web sites. It has been estimated that the web is actually 500 times larger than the number of pages spidered to date. For the search engines the good news is that the 90:10 rule applies, and that by adding only 50 times more pages, instead of the 500 times predicted to exist as hidden pages, they will account for 90% of the frequently used content on the web.

For SEO practitioners, it means that rapid growth in the number of indexed pages is imminent. As a result, getting a top 10 ranking will soon mean getting a site ranked in the top 0.0002% of the results. Obviously this is not work for lesser SEO practitioners, and certainly beyond the capabilities of most site owners. In fact, I suspect that most SEO firms will be unable to satisfy their clients ranking requests (close, but no top 10) and there will be significant client dissatisfaction with SEO results, employing 3 or more SEO practitioners without success.

For web design firms, they will find that the rush to the web will come to a crawl. Many web designers will be hard pressed to find new business as prospective clients find search engine ranking beyond their financial reach. If so, I expect there to be renewed focus on alternate promotion activities such as PPC engines, ads, and yes, maybe even resurrected banners for the initial nine months or so for each SEO project. Now the numbers game starts. Suppose there are 200k results today to a 2-word query, and suppose there are only 50 times as many pages for each query.

I believe it is realistic to find ourselves with ten million pages in response to each inquiry within one to two years. Now suppose the average page starts in the middle (5,000,000), and that the average ranking can always be increased 90% with each consecutive "improvement". That means that after tweak 1 the ranking improves by 90% to 500k, tweak 2: ranking is now 50k, tweak 3: 5k, tweak 4: 500, tweak 5: 50, and tweak 6 may result in a top 10 ranking. Nobody can get 6 consecutive 90% gains facing increased competition from optimized sites without the right analysis tools and methodologies, and many tweaks may prove ineffective.

In fact, the effectiveness of consecutive tweaks diminishes, such that tweak one is 90%, two is maybe 75%, three is maybe 60% and so on. Remember, your competition is tweaking at the same time, and the search engines are constantly refining their algorithms to keep pace with this new content. And each consecutive tweak is more difficult than the previous due to the quality and quantity of the competition. This means that only the top SEO practitioners can ever attain a top 10 result for a meaningful keyword. The rest will just fade away.

Aside from the additional number of tweaks, each with a submission and spidering cycle of over three weeks (making this a much longer process than today, probably doubling the project schedule a year from now), the precision needed to rank a page well in one search engine will certainly disqualify that same page from a simultaneous top ranking in many search engines.

Pages that rank well today in many engines will find that their aggregated ranking will erode and sites will have to settle for ranking in only the three or four engines at a time. If a client wants other engines to rank their site, then they must tune additional pages, thus they will have to expand their content and Search Engine Optimization base to include many more pages within their site. Optimizing more pages is certainly the way to go, but it doubles or triples the work involved by the SEO practitioner. As a result, SEO practitioners have a much more difficult battle, they require much more sophisticated. integrated tools, and projects require more time.

They must optimize more pages, and thus they must inherently charge much more than today. If this is done top rankings are still very possible, but this becomes the realm of only the exceptionally competent (or very lucky) SEO practitioner. Expect a significant growth in the number of indexed pages and expect a fallout of those SEO practitioners that are no longer viable. You can also expect longer Search Engine Optimization schedules, expect fewer top rankings per optimized page (necessitating larger projects), and expect an increase in pricing of at least triple that paid today.

What this does to the entire web industry is to scare off those without the funds to participate in a competent SEO effort. What was once thought of as free now has a high cost-of-entry. And this will kill the web as a golden goose. It will cost much more to make money on the web, just like in a "real business".

The rewards are getting larger, but so is the cost. And as with the Emperors New Clothes, many SEO practitioners have been reluctant to discuss this transformation for fear of getting hurt (scaring off customers). I, for one, am not afraid to roll up my sleeves and do the hard work for the just rewards. But not everybody is as capable. Many in the SEO industry are standing there naked, and it isn't a pretty picture. But it is time to expose the difficulties associated with SEO.