Are search engine rankings dead? Bruce Clay says yes, but we disagree
Chris Mulvaney is the CEO of CMDS. I make things... I’m the creative entrepreneur with passion for (re)making brands and inventing solutions to problems no one knows exist.
Bruce Clay is a powerhouse personality in the SEO industry. Notably, Search Engine Optimization personalities tend to be ignored in Wikipedia, but Bruce Clay has his own page in Wikipedia – very impressive.
In November of 2008, Bruce Clay publicly declared that “Search Engine Rankings Are Dead?”
We have been watching the same trends that Clay referred to when he made this declaration. We did not draw the same conclusions that Clay did when he made this statement and earned the full attention of the SEO industry and the search engine related news websites.
We agree in one regard, we have moved towards a different world in search algorithms – a world where the search user’s past activity will slant the search results.
When Google introduced for the first time the ability for its users to log into Google and to do their searches while logged into Google’s website, it became clear that Google was making a concerted effort to move towards creating a personalized search engine that is relevent to different audiences, based on past usage habits.
To show you how we believe that Clay’s argument is flawed, we are going to use his own argument against him. In his interview with Web Pro News, Clay said that it is like searching for the word, “Java”.
He rightly said that a computer programmer will likely do that search with the intent of uncovering Java programming websites. He said that a coffee drinker would use that word in a search to find coffee-related websites. He also said that a traveler would expect to find information about Java, Indonesia.
Right, right and right.
But that does not mean that search rankings are dead. If you have a website that deals with travel to Indonesia, all that the Google personalization algorithms have done is to ensure that the people finding your website in a Google search are going to be the people more likely to buy what you are selling.
Google has done you a favor!
Google has made it possible for you to have to compete ONLY with other sites in the travel industry. You no longer have a need to compete with the coffee shops and the programming websites in order to get your website ranked well against YOUR competition for the search word, “Java”!
Once Google – through personalization – has given you the ability to only have to compete with other Indonesia travel websites for the attention of the consumer, Google has done you the favor of making it possible for only the most targeted users to be shown your website in Google’s search results.
Those other websites hawking computer programming or coffee will no longer cloud the search results for “Java”, enabling your website to perform even better in Google’s search results than you would have if the travel results were mixed into the search results with the computer programming and the coffee websites.
Bruce, we like you man. But, you have told us a story about personalized search that does not withstand scrutiny! Search Engine Rankings are NOT dead! They are just changed… They are different than they were before…