Diversifying SEO Risk

I was writing a comment on TechDirt on the growing frustration people have with Google. I’ve been blogging about it recently from a few angles with surprising frequency (surprising to me, at least). And I realized something while typing up that comment.

First is it reasonable for Google to maintain it’s stance on keeping their algorithms secret as well as maintaining a sort of website neutrality (from a search standpoint)? They clearly believe it and I buy it, as well. They’ve got a lot of big brains there and their search ranking is their crown jewel and they don’t want to give it up - the barrier to entry for a search engine is hardware and the algorithms. Open algorithms would be a completely different business model and not one that a company as sizeable as Google could risk, I’d guess. Also, I don’t know but I suspect there is at least some measure of security in the obscurity of their work, but perhaps not.

At any rate, though, Google clearly believes it is not in their interest to tell you anything and that, to a large extent, is what matters. So it doesn’t seem likely that change is on the way, from Google at least. What are the options? More search engines. I believe that search is for the foreseeable future, a critical component of any successful website, it’s how people sift through the tons of data on the web, it isn’t reasonable to believe that search will become a small part of your traffic anytime soon. But the real problem is that all the search traffic is coming from 1 place, so if you mess up by that place’s standards it’s game over.

The fix, though, could be more search engines. If search traffic was coming from several sites, changes you make might upset one but not the other, basically your risk would be diversified out to several sites your search traffic much less volatile as different sites decide your ranking each in it’s own way. I think this is happening to a degree with some niche players like technorati coming into the mix as well as social discovery sites like Digg. With all this mounting frustration, I think it could be a good time for a new crop of search engines to claw their way into the public, general and niche alike. Keep your eye on the Wikia engine, I’m hoping that they have some good ideas and open algorithms. I also hope the VC world decides to back more engines - I think we all need them.

Mar 14th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: google