Demand Media has reached a heady valuation of $1.5 billion after floating in January. It’s the high water mark for SEO surely?
As the amount of content published on the web increases, investment in SEO and pay per click (PPC) has had to increase in parallel to maintain its effectiveness and yet anecdotally the value of results from search engines is diminishing.
Search for car insurance, holidays in South Africa or dishwashers (spot my personal motivations) and you’ll see what’s happening for yourself: highly competitive markets for PPC and millions of natural results packed with web spam.
Demand Media pumps out more than 7,000 articles a day. It has a simple formula according to Read Write Web:
Create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software and make lots of money through ads.
[…] people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. […] The fact is that we’re not perfect […] we can and should do better.
But is it too late? Social search or recommendation via your social network is around the corner.
Hi Steve,
SEO is broken? Wow you’re a braver man than I am (cue the backlash of SEOs up and down the country who have passionately crafted their art over years and years and 000s of websites).
SEO is the practice of making ALL content:
a) as indexable as possible in order to aid the algorithms in their ongoing insatiable quest for content, and
b) as relevant as possible to the end user query.
- whether this is user-generated, branded or fact-based; whether text, image, video or map-based content.
For as long as websites are built poorly, using programming languages and technologies that the search engines can’t easily read, and for as long as content is produced without prior analysis of search behaviour to fundamentally understand the demand for this content, then there will always be a place for SEO in any digital marketing plan and within any commercial publishing operation.
Hi Amanda – This isn’t an attack on SEO agencies at all. Quite the contrary. Merely an observation that for popular search keywords the web is saturated, rendering search useless, and that content farms such as Demand Media aren’t helping the situation. Search worked when content was hard to find. Cheers, Wadds
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stephen Waddington, Andy Barr, JonClements, RickWaghorn, from Staniforth and others. from Staniforth said: RT @wadds: Just blogged > SEO is broken: http://wadds.co/gTcuwA #fb #wadds [...]
Lovely post
Hi Wadds,
SEO is not so much broken, but continuing to evolve – as it has always done.
However, $1.5 billion does seem quite a lot for Demand Media considering the impact social search or recommendation could have on its business operation, which will rightly rank content designed for humans rather than bots a lot higher.
But Amanda is right – there’ll always be demand for SEO as long as websites are built poorly, using programming languages and technologies that the search engines can’t easily read.
The challenge and potential opportunity for PRs is understanding how social media and online PR impacts upon search. However, in my experience too few PRs have even a basic grasp of SEO and it’s an opportunity other digital practices are already keen to seize.
Thanks,
Ben
[...] it’d look ridiculously link-baity. It still does, however after the Demand Media IPO fiasco, a conversation with Stephen the other night and today’s J.C. Penney controversy, I feel much braver. So here goes, Google [...]
[...] SEO is broken [...]
[...] In time I think that we’ll come to see the floatation of Demand Media in January with a valuation of $1.5 billion as the high water mark of search marketing. [...]