SEO is dead: entrepreneurial enterprises difficult to use SEO to get more browsing

Lead: "SEO" is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups, said Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch, the US consumer creative website, Chris Dixon on a personal blog today.

The following is the full text of the article:

Most of today's successful information Web sites are initially growing dependent on SEO, including Yelp, Wikipedia and TripAdvisor.

Whether or not they have been carefully designed, their marketing strategy is roughly as follows: 1 build a community of contributors to create quality content, 2 become the authoritative site for the areas they are involved in, and 3 get a higher ranking in natural search results.

This makes the use of SEO to attract more users to become a virtuous cycle, thus prompting enterprises to attract more contributors and import links (inbound link), and expand more SEO. In about 2001-2008 years, SEO is a high-quality information site the most effective marketing channels.

I've communicated with a lot of startups, but almost no one has got a lot of traffic through SEO 2008 years later (the rare exception is to focus on the areas of content that didn't make money in the past).

Google's algorithm has been external secrecy, but it is widely believed that the import link is the biggest factor. This ultimately makes two types of Web sites benefit: 1 long time and has been established for many years of import links, 2 actively establish links, that is, the so-called Black Hat seo. (Another possibility is that Google will be able to give a higher weight to some longer web sites directly.) )

This is true in the highly profitable hotel search area. Search Google for "Four Seasons Hotel in New York" (Four seasons), and the TripAdvisor page, which is full of ads, is ranked high.

　　

The Four Seasons Hotel TripAdvisor page

On the contrary, the pages are more refreshing, and the oyster pages with richer information are ranked much lower.

　　

The Four Seasons Hotel Oyster page

This can lead to a decline in user experience, and startups will also have the incentive to stack ads between pages and launch aggressive SEO strategies rather than focus on creating a superior user experience.

Network Economy (e-commerce + advertising) is a value of hundreds of millions of of dollars in the market, which has a lot of revenue from the SEO, which spawned a hundreds of millions of-dollar SEO industry. Some SEO consultants belong to "white hat", they usually give the site to provide benign advice, make it more friendly to search engines. But there are also large black hat SEO consultants, who specialize in trading and selling links, and through SEO technology to help companies such as "content farms" promote low quality content.

Google seems to be sparing no effort to improve the algorithm so that the best content is ranked first in search results. But there are still tens of thousands of people in the business of teasing the search engine, with output worth as much as billions of dollars. At least for now, high quality content is facing losses. Before this changes, startups-which are usually less staff, have low budgets and have concerns about abandoning the black Hat strategy-should not be used as a viable marketing strategy. (Book PEI)