4 Big Holes In Today’s “Regulate SEO” Post On TechCrunch

There’s a post today on TechCrunch that lambastes Google, search engine advertising, and search engine optimization, calling for regulation. While there are probably dozens of misconceptions laid out in this post, I’ve isolated four misconceptions that I feel are MAJOR holes in this argument:

1. “[SEO] is more voodoo than science.” Puh-leeze. SEO, like a lot of techno-scientific disciplines, is just math. In fact, search engine optimization is really pretty simple. First, you make it so the engines can find and understand your content. Then, you get people to link to it. While there are some “tricks,” good SEO is about following these two guiding principles. Just like a caveman would probably smash a cellphone on a rock to find the person stuck inside, this author demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of search engines.

2. Google doesn’t control sh#t. In the opening paragraphs, the author compares Google’s “control” of search engine results to a dominant police state with total control. While I will wholeheartedly agree that Google is the dominant search provider, I can think of thousands of instances where Google search results are poor because of spam and/or manipulation. To use the author’s example, it’s like we live in a police state, but most of the police are toddlers who are easily fooled or ignored.

3. Consumer behavior is subject to dramatic change. The author says that “consumer behavior dictates the top three results on any search page are all that matter.” First of all, I disagree – it depends on the search. Organic positions 4-10 are important and can generate significant traffic, not to mention the importnance of ad positions for high commercial intent keywords…but I digress. My point is that consumer behavior is constantly changing and evolving – as consumers become more accustomed to Google search results, they often begin to look beyond the top of the list.

4. “Search market share” doesn’t exist. The author makes a fundamental logical mistake when he describes search in terms of market share. Basically, he or she believes that certian entities have a dominant position in their respective search verticals and therefore newcomers can never compete. The only problem? Search engine queries are continuosly expanding. More than 25% of all searches conducted today, right now, have never been searched before. Never. Combined with the fact that consumers are becoming more search savvy (using longer queries, becoming more specific in terms of locality, etc.), we’re starting to see more stratification in the search marketplace, not less.

I agree that Google’s lack of transparency is frustrating, especially their tendency to slap AdWords accounts with little explanation. Having said that, I’ve never had a problem with Google when I was working on campaigns that were totally legit…it was always the edgy stuff that I had problems with.

To me, this article looks like sour grapes from a Philistine.