An interesting fight has broken out about SEO and why startups should no longer focus on it. I think it is more about the underlying mechanisms.

There is a fundamental flaw now in Google's original basic premise. And it is this - pagerank is based upon numbers of links pointing at a site. Each site has its own pagerank and that pagerank then contributes to any site it links to. e.g. if techcrunch linked to my blog its high pagerank contributes a larger amount than a lower ranked site. The more inbound links I get the higher I rank. 

The flaw is that SEO has continued to undermine that basic idea - the success of the ranking has becomes its own worse enemy, for many years Google was way ahead of the game and kept most of the spam out. But link building and content farms (e.g. demand media) have started producing content at such a volume and within quality constraints that can fools Google's algorithms into thinking it's great content. 

Change but no future

Google in response has updated its algorithm to target content farms - but this is just a 'patch' on a broken system. It has a set of signals that is relying upon and all it is doing is pulling a couple of different levers to change which signals weigh differently, the end result is that short term it will improve, long term it cannot. 

The bottom line is that Google needs new signals - it needs data from the social graph so it can quickly and effectively understand what is good + bad content. And this is why they got so 'het up' about Bing (supposedly) stealing data - but what they really are scared about is that Microsoft in this race is actually the innovator right now - they are using lots of new social signals that makeup the overall result. 

And why they are scared of the data that Facebook has - and would love to buy Twitter. 

SEO is dead - long live SEO

Why I disagree with Chris's post is that in reality SEO is actually here to stay - but what makes up SEO will fundamentally change, instead of link building companies will be focused on managing and optimising the new signals. 

In my mind those new signals will be based largely around the social graph. Companies are already paying celebrities to tweet on their behalf - this is the SEO of the future.