Search Engine World, Changes, Compliance History

2003 - The momentum continued with the anti spam band wagon, and finally companies realised that their websites were going to have to change if they wanted to get listed in search engines. Website design changed radically, flash was now a code to be used carefully, content was now a growing part of any presentation by smaller web agencies. Most of the big media companies still had their heads in the clouds, many SEO companies were in decline, familiar industry names started to lose clients fast due to the new challenges to get listed and the persistent culling of badly created strategies.

This was the year that we were able to grow up, the realisation in 2002 that the search engine world had changed forever ensured we were ahead of the game. All SEO work was now applied directly to the client’s websites, the key was improvement and not black hat techniques. It was the medium and long term gains that were to be important to clients.

Unfortunately large software driven companies were falling by the wayside, unable to adapt software quickly enough to counter the changing algorithms and this sounded the death knell for them. Our market had changed, we were now starting to consult more with enterprise business and less with the SME market. Prospective clients were now happier to have their badly constructed websites improved for search engines.

The increasing reliance on PPC by agencies and website owners who had lost all positions in the culls had started an irreversible new market. Companies who were once selling SEO were re-branded as SEM companies, selling PPC management services. Of course PPC had always been there but it was now a new rolling band wagon, an excuse for agencies who could not deliver ethical SEO.

This was the year that saw the complete demise of search engines such as Alta Vista, sold then resold for paltry sums of money, Inktomi once led search technology but was now in Google’s wake. Google maintained its strangle hold and ever tightened it.

Of course there was some irony here. Google is a great facility, it was born in an era of sloth search engines who were too sure of their market share and too lazy to change. Google had been built up and made popular by the SEO industry, now everyone used Google at some point... but the irony was that the many agencies and webmasters who were caught up in the new idealistic search engine were now victims of its success.

Of course no search engine wants to be manipulated and rightly so, the problem was that most of the webmasters and the SEO companies could not adjust to the speed of change. Google’s massive rise and capture of the market was not foreseen, the level playing field had gone... possibly forever, but web marketers were themselves stuck in the ways of the old and not able to alter their practice or perhaps understand how it should be altered.

In this industry clients are fickle, they may enjoy three years of page1 but then two months of page 9 is enough for many of them to look for pastures new. It is for this reason that the large agencies have switched their business model and left organic search alone.

For them the future is the ever more competitive world of PPC, of course this was decided for them by Google in November... The Florida Update... this update tore the heart out of search positions for a massive part of the industry, it ended businesses overnight and was the precursor to Google generating revenue from its PPC system prior to its IPO in 2004.