SEO Is Finished Long Live Traffic and Conversions

With that out of the way, let's explain the title. Ranking in Google is dead. Well, that's a very bold statement, but for those of us servicing clients and basing our results, and our ability to invoice our clients, or perhaps make money from out own affiliate network on the internet, it's probably true. The video that I made to go with this article shows the problem. Google has increased the level of abstraction between a simple search term and the results given to the user. And this abstraction is now so complex and powerful that it's almost impossible to define what the “typical” Google user is. Your results will depend entirely (and I use “entirely” after some thought) on a list of factors including, but not limited to;   Where you live? Your IP address? What have you searched for recently? Whether you are you signed into Google? What sites have you looked at since you last cleared your Internet cache? Whether you have watched any Youtube videos recently, and which ones. What your Gmail account is used for, what services have you signed up for using it? These are just six questions that Google's algorithm asks itself every time you do a search. And the search results that it gives back to you are now very much dependent on the answers that it gets back. Take Monday as an example   I'm sitting on my desk at home and type in a search term one of my clients looking to rank for. I've done a lot of link building using Ultimate Demon link tool over the past week or so, and I'm expecting an improvement in SERPS I look and see that I am number six on page 1. An hour later I grab my laptop and go for a cup of coffee at a delicatessen 200 yards down the road and look again, same operating system, same browser, same Location (different IP however) and lo and behold. The site is number three on page 1. The client rings me this morning while I'm preparing an Ultimate Demon campaign and congratulates me on getting her site right at the very top of the search engine results. I flip open my phone to check, and the site is not even on page one for this search term. To add confusion, my expensive rank tracking software tells me I'm second. This is after choosing a “search from“ location and specifying the very same browser agent that should exactly match my home PC. Now the people that sell these applications will tell you that their result is correct. They have cleared their internet cache, turned off personalization. In the end, they may take an average rank from several different IP addresses. Yet even between packages that calim to do all this, the results obtained now vary a great deal. None of these results are representative of anything that a prospective visitor to your site may actually receive when doing a search for a term you are looking to rank for. It's not just SERPS that needs reviewing. Ultimate Demon fetches Page rank (capital “P” - “Page” refers to Larry Page the inventor of the “Page rank”– not as many think – a “page” on your website), Alexa – a measure of traffic based on sample sizes so small and so easily manipulated that they should not be used by anyone with serious intent to develop metrics and key performance indicators. Finally “WOT” rating, which is a user vote rating of a sites content and suitability and other factors. None of these give anything like a definitive view of a websites success, and all can be cherry picked and used at certain times to make all sorts of conclusions which are counter intuitive and counter logical. The variations I discovered in these tests is so enormous that it's hard to make a case that an “average user” even exists. Google has personalised everybody's experience down to a granular level. If you've been using your PC for more than a few days your results are going to be significantly different for just about everything from a similar user typing in the same search queries from a different location and a different PC.