I’ve been at the Search Engine Strategies London conference this week, where the keynote was given by Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism. I'd never heard of Matt or his theory before, but his talk certainly got me thinking. He showed how many moments of innovation have been created by people who were thought to be pirates at the time because their invention seemed to negatively affect the business of others. Two of the many examples that he cited were Thomas Edison, inventor of the gramophone who was accused by musicians of harming the business of live music, and pirate radio stations who were accused by record labels of harming their revenue even though they actually brought innovation and new music to a wider audience, thus increasing their sales. His theory is that pirates operate in areas of a market that current businesses cannot reach, but that they provide something that a market needs and therefore gain adoption whilst carving out a new niche. The reaction of existing (legitimate) businesses in that market is to try and exclude the pirates by pushing legislators to shut them down, but this is rarely effective whilst the demand from the market continues - because as one pirate is shut down, another appears. The lawyers soon tire of this and resort to the alternative option of squashing demand by pursuing the individuals in the market who are creating the demand, but this effectively ends up as companies suing their own clients - hardly a recipe for success. Matt then went on to show how this cycle of piracy has repeatedly caused innovation and developed industries that would otherwise have remained static, with a status quo that suited the incumbents however bad their services or products might have been.
Whilst I found Matt's talk interesting I wasn't sure how it applied to search marketing, but a session yesterday supplied, for me at least, something of an answer. A panel of notables from the search industry (Kevin Ryan, Rand Fiskin, Brett Tabke, Chris Sherman and Jill Whalen) discussed the future of SEO, covering a wide range of topics, including the issue of whether an SEO's job is to game the system or play by the rules. All but one of the panelists seemed to agree that gaming the system by, for example, getting friends to submit reviews on restaurant review sites so that they rank well in local searches, was unacceptable. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz was the lone voice who said that it was an SEO's job, because they are paid to find ways to exploit the system. I agree with Rand, and I guess the moral question is how far you go - but putting that to one side for a moment, the conclusion for me is that SEO's help to improve the system by gaming it. The first versions of every new website or online concept have always been clunky, and if we all stuck by the rules and didn't make the search engines work harder they'd never evolve. In the case of evolving search engine algorithms, the improvements have been about nuance and picking up the whole range of subtle clues that exist within the content and patterns of human communication.
When search engines tune their algorithms more accurately to the true nature of human communications everybody benefits. Human communications are infinitely complex, from someone's body language,a change in tone, or a raised eyebrow there are many signals that we factor in. It should be no different in the online environment – and there are many signals that search engines have available to them (especially now with the ever-increasing amount of user generated content). By making sure that the search engines mould themselves to the full range of our communications, we don't stifle the development of the internet. The alternative, where our online behaviour and communications have to conform to the requirements of the engines, because of limitations in their algorithms, is not a sensible one.
I originally trained as a research biologist, with a particular interest in the evolutionary biochemical arms race between plants, fungi and animals. I see many parallels in the online world, and the issue of SEOs and the evolutionary pressures that they exert is one of them. No system exists in a state of perfect altruism – and that's not some abstract Zen issue as Kevin Ryan joked at the conference. Any ecosystem that provides a niche for an organism to exploit will be exploited sooner or later. The difference is that successful organisms don’t exceed their niche to the point where they wreck their ecosystem, which is what blackhat SEO’s threaten to do.
As for the restaurant thing, we couldn’t do it and would be sure to remind a client that suggested it about the UK Unfair Trading Regulations (which ban this kind of fake endorsement in return for compensation). At VCCP Search we only recommend and practice white hat SEO, but that doesn’t mean we don’t exploit other sensbile, legal opportunities where we see them.
Paul Wolferstan
Managing Partner + Head of Natural Search