I Googled “Is SEO dead?” and the list of posts and blogs that had something to say is long.  From what I can gather, it is not dead but merely undergoing a profound change—so profound that some SEO experts are changing their titles and job descriptions and renaming and redesigning their companies.

According to SEO expert Sam McRoberts in Jayson DeMers’ Forbes article “Is SEO Dead?”, what’s dying is the practice of “manipulating search engines to place sites that don’t really deserve to rank well at the top of the SERPs”. Originally SEO or search engine optimization was the process of making websites more accessible and understandable to search engines. Since then, it has come to mean more about manipulating rankings.

Enter Google and it’s algorithm updates such as Panda and Penguin that were clearly aimed at stopping these manipulative tactics. Panda went for the sites with thin or duplicate content or too many ads on-page. Penguin jumped on over-optimized anchor text. Later updates went after keyword rich domain names.

Google did this because too many search engine optimizers were creating bogus sites with poor quality content and loading them with keywords and back links. This was degrading Google’s search results. Google relies on having excellent SERPs so people will continue to use them. They had to make changes and this is where “SEO is dead” comes from. All their changes impacted these manipulative tactics. They sent a clear message that they wanted it to stop and it changed, and is still changing the game. What worked two years ago, no longer works today.

SEO will survive as long as search engines exist. But now it is dependent on other areas such as content, social media and PR. MacRoberts feels that the role of an search engine optimizer has changed from a specialist/technician to a more of a project manager/strategist role. He sees SEO less as a marketing tactic,but more of a long-term branding technique. Companies that specialized in SEO are finding themselves so involved in digital marketing that they are no longer referring to themselves as “SEO Strategists”, but rather as “Digital Marketing Strategists”. They are rebranding and redesigning themselves. SEO isn’t dead, but along with content and link building, it has evolved. Maybe it needs a new name “digital marketing optimization” or “web presence optimization”.

Simon Abbott