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On Self-Defeating Business Models
By Julie | June 18, 2007
One of the interesting things to watch over the coming year will be what happens to a fairly common SEO business model, that of the ‘guaranteed top rankings!!!!’
With Google’s move to Universal Search and personalization, and the various manuevers of Yahoo, it’s hard to say where the people who promise rankings will land. It’s certain that a lot of businesses will still listen to their pitch and buy into the promise, but what will the result be? Graywolf, at SMX, said that the best bet is to encourage the customers to log in and use Google a lot to egowhack, as it will make an SEO’s effort look effective, even if actual traffic is flat.
A lot of the guaranteed ranking crowd require various plug-ins. It’s hard to say if this will keep working, although I’ve never quite understood how it worked in the first place. In a somewhat hard-to-believe confession, I am sad that some people are so dumb to buy into that.
I also have to wonder how this is going to hit other businesses with self-defeating business models that relate to SEO. For instance, I used to work for an agency that owned an affiliate portal focused on aggregating offerings from many providers of a consumer commodity — used cars. This agency also did a lot of agency work for the providers of said consumer commodity (used car dealers!).
Fundamentally, from an SEO perspective, the providers’ sites and the affiliate portal were competing for the same searches and eyeballs. How many clients could this agency really hope to serve and satisfy while maintaining their own strong position in search engines? Do Universal Search and Web History change the playing field there relative to SEO service? Right now, my money is on ‘no.’ That’s why most agencies try to avoid too many competing clients in a single vertical.
Especially used car dealers. Ech.
Topics: PPC, SEO, conferences, day job, dumb techniques, google, local search, marketing, rank, search engine features, search results, yahoo |
June 18th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
June 19th, 2007 at 10:17 am
You go girl!