The technology and gadget space is saturated, so even if this were a well curated site, it winds up looking generic. The screenshot is hilarious, but shows that they’re probably not doing a lot of due diligence but instead are simply reporting on their own anecdotal keyword traffic findings. Oddly, if you trust Alexa’s Clickstream numbers, they rely on Google (and not Bing) for most of their search traffic.

I agree, the rising reliance on content (and user experience) makes the synergy between SEO and other parts of an organization more critical than ever. Yet, the public flogging SEO is taking from mainstream media, the Internati and other search engines creates a difficult landscape to make those connections.

Here’s the example I tweeted to you earlier: http://bit.ly/lnorzm

The site is conspicuously like about 10,000+ other tech sites covering the latest and greatest gadgets. Even if the content is 100% original, is there a value add to have the site in the index? Sounds harsh but when I put my “blind five year old” glasses on, this site looks like hundreds of others and the algo probably thinks so too.

I find it amusing that they promote the Bing angle as a better alternative only to offer a screenshot of their own site in the results as evidence. Nothing like objectivity.

At the end of the day, I can build a solid site structurally but often have little say in the content that goes on the page. That content now weighs more heavily than ever. It’s disconcerting to know that SEO success now depends heavily on parts of an organization that might mistrust our efforts.

Time to do more internal networking.

I hope it forces those who ‘claim’ to offer SEO to move on to something else. Moving the needle will become more difficult in the next couple of years. Unfortunately, that may push many to resort to more gray and black hat tactics. I anticipate a bumpy ride, but believe the industry will finally emerge stronger as a result.

That’s true, it would be interesting to track the number of sites during this time frame as well. There are a lot of sites out there now and the oil from those fields SERPs is about to run dry.

The next couple years should prove quite interesting indeed.

Law of supply and demand, we have an oversupply of results, a squeeze from local search results displaying Google Places and a dwindling demand (searches).

Yes, there will be pain.