I have spent a lot of time researching and interpreting what is happening with Search Engines and with social bookmarking - I have tended to focus on what I see as the increasingly important sector which is social networking, I have also looked deeply into changes in the SEO areas. I definately do not believe that search engines are dead or dying - far from it - but I do think they are no longer the only solution to successful Internet marketing, currently, to put a figure on it, I would suggest that SEO is 60 percent and Social Tagging 30 percent of how a website is found and used, but social bookmarking and networking are growing at the expense of conventional Search Engine usage.
My concern is to both to create a solution which brings business to a website now, but also places it in a stronger position than most of the competition in the near future.
My interpretation of use of this change of emphasis is my belief that the shift of online information will be towards mobile devices - the iphone and BlackBerry are just two obvious examples, but the laptop is morphing into an intermediate product, just as the iphone is no longer a miniature telephone and is morphing into a laptop.
The cost of developing and establishing a commercial website (a website which is responsible for generating income) is increasing exponentially, just as the actual cost of the software and systems needed is shrinking - my logic here is to think and design for the mobile now and to adapt this to conventional browser use - (Opera rather than Firefox).
My point is that search engine disciplines are not so useful on small screens or mobiles - a response to a question tends to come through the portal software already in the device or from the immediate online source of the service supplier - imagine trying to define a keyword search just using icons - it is a paradigm shift.
This is happening at the same time that the "dark forces" are seriously threatening the validity of search engines, Google appears to be impotent to the attacks by slimers slipping through their filters with obviously dirty tricks which do not strictly break the letter of their rules, combine this with a massive growth in value attacks on Google algorithms and we get what we are seeing now, Google seems almost paralyzed and unable to clear out the scum due to it being inextricably mixed in with the good stuff.
Their whole philosophy of giving relevant results seems threatened - but in fact it isn't. Google don't give a toss about "fairness" to website owners, only being seen to give good relevant results to searchers and thus being able to deliver paid advertising. Google is concentrating on improving the quality of click-throughs and reducing fraudulent clicks - this has (short term) negatively affected the Adsense revenue for many people - but the long term benefit is to Google shareholders and the quality of delivered advertising will be greater, as will their revenue - fewer clicks for more money - this happened in 2007 and is the right policy for their migration to a cellphone 3G market. I mention this as it means their search results only need to return "visibly" good information, the money is in the adverts - someone like rhf, by spending a lot of money, will be able to maintain a strong presence as the weaker sites will not "appear" to be relevant (or match the advertising) - in other words we get a shopping mall of branded shops and no local stores as they cannot afford the entry cost.
Hence the problem, we will lose ground to the websites spending a lot on jiggery-pokery as they are using a wallet of money to gain short term positioning - I assume they will then use their wallet to "shift" to other ponies when (if) these tactics are confounded - Google meanwhile pretends to be frozen like a manacled bear being attacked by a pack of dogs, not knowing which way to turn - growling but achieving nothing much. Google knows what it is doing, I believe it would love us to think that it is not a commercial giant interested only in shareholder dividends.
We are fighting a multi headed Hydra - I have found old (2002), banned, techniques resurrected in a new skin - my latest concern is the theft of original copy from social bookmarking sites and then that copy being replicated by an "optimiser" and, with stronger back links, displacing the original article from the indexes using simple "nofollow" and other tricks, Google is deceived and the cheating site wins to the cost of the site which created the content.
Focusing on social bookmarking optimisation also has dangers - the theft and abuse of content to get high "Digg" ratings to reinforce search engine placement is one obvious risk. Most abuse of social bookmarking seems to be to enhance search engine placement, but it can also result in original source material not getting registered.
The best "clean" solution is to have your own community of loyal readers which are sufficient to generate income and growth, thus not depending on search engines of communities - the paradox being that in itself this will be the most powerful tool for a highly placed site in both search engines and social networks. But this is a dream only a few sites can aspire to.
We would be foolish to believe that Google will keep to their motto of "Do No Evil" - if we wait for them to remove successful sites which use marginal leverage to gain position, we are likely to be disappointed - by all means "report" abuses - but do not have any faith in this as a solution - it is pissing in the wind.
Ok - solutions
1. I am again interested in micro networking - interestingly I designed an interesting system for a client in 2003 and started to put it in place - I only did about 5 percent of this in the 6 months I was on the project - but the basic model is still sound and if nofollow and robots.txt is correctly applied it is clean and valuable. We can look at the sites we operate together and coordinate these in micro groupings and develop this strategy - as an optimum minimum I suggest a sector of 49 complete sites in 7 segments is needed
2. Back links - I have not had a linking policy for three years due to Google warnings - I see no harm now in selecting seven sites we have to generate link exchanges in areas we can look to be authorities.
3. Blogs - seven blogs each in an "authority" segment generating daily content which is used carefully to feed other segments in the same sector - apart from web design - site content should be feed generated
4. Social Bookmarking - all sites and all new content we are considering and we create needs to be fed to the ten SB leaders, pinged, dropped, stumbled etc at the deliberated optimum rate for each - there is some software for some of this, but mainly it is a manual job
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Contributor's Note
Tony is developing a new social community service for travelers
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