Four people liked that question, 45 didn’t like that question! I’m still going to answer it.
Yes, I think SEO will still exist in 5 years. Google tries to make it so that you don’t need to be an SEO expert, but SEO in some sense is almost like a resume. In the same way that you polish a resume, you figure out how to put your best foot forward.
SEO tries to figure out how to put the best foot forward for your website.
SEO is not spam. There are many, many white-hat ways to do SEO. Canonicalization, something that we’ve been talking about a lot recently, can make sure that all of your URLs get the backlinks they deserve, you don’t have a lot of duplicate content etc. There are plenty of great things that you can do as a developer, or as an SEO, to make sure that your site is well represented and makes the right impression, it’s really useful for visitors etc.
Those are all great things that you can do. So, I think that that, as a practice, will definitely still exist in 5 years. The hope is that the black-hat, or sometimes the illegal stuff, crap-hat, whatever you want to call it, the stuff that’s really kind of annoying if you’re a site owner, the stuff pollutes or clogs up the web; that that would not be as productive.
My hope is, more and more people keep switching to white-hat, more and more people learn about SEO, but don’t necessarily have to become experts; they can use self-service tools like the Webmaster console or other search engine’s consoles to help them out on SEO.
But, we provide a free SEO starter guide, it’s a 20 page PDF, and we wouldn’t do that if we didn’t think there was some value in that, if we didn’t think there was some value to SEO.
SEO doesn’t have to mean spam, SEO doesn’t have to mean black-hat. SEO can help you put your best face on your website, just like you polish your resume.
I think it (SEO) will be around in 5 years and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
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