Shoemoney vs. Graywolf on SEO’s Future

Shoemoney and his SEO related posts are, in my opinion, pure link bait. He writes one every once in a while and it always gets the SEO community buzzing. But, this time I find what he is saying to hold much truth.

Let’s take a look at the posts in question. Shoemoney wrote that SEO has no future, and Gray responded saying that SEO does have a future.

I think the key here is context. And when these two posts are viewed in the correct context, both could be considered quite accurate. Let’s take a look.

Shoemoney:

My honest answer is there is no future in SEO. From my experiences I am seeing Google SERPS results strongly influenced by Google Toolbar data, Google User history, and Google Analytics data. Googles combination of SEO and social voting via toolbar/history/analytics will continue to sway more in the realm of social voting. I feel this technology will only get better. I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing.

I think Shoe is on to something here. Google has had a LOT of live index updates this year, some of them indexing and ranking my posts within 5 minutes of hitting the publish button. In each case of the live index movement, there were no special code tricks, no big SEO changes on the pages that were ranked well, and I did nothing more than optimize the title and permalink to match the keyphrases that I was targeting.

So the real SEO in this case was simply knowing what topic was hot at the time, knowing that Google was moving its SERP in real time, and writing relevant content.

It worked! And it was for a set of keywords, in one case, that sent an extra 10,000 visits that day. So, in essence, Shoe is correct in that SEO as we’ve known it (generally speaking) is probably going to become less and less relevant moving forward. But, this in no way means SEO is dead over all. Instead, I believe it means SEO will become more defined.

Gray:

Now Shoemoney is a friend of mine, but regarding his post SEO Has No Future today, I am forced to disagree with him. Not only does SEO have a future but judging by the number of SEO clients I am turning away, and the number of job offers I am receiving on weekly basis to take on in house positions, all during a shrinking economy and a recession, the future is looking pretty bright for SEO

If you read the entire post over at Graywolf, you’ll see that Gray is also correct in that good SEO is needed to clean up the mistakes a lot of programmers make when trying to create visually appealing websites that do nothing for the user experience or the search engine visibility. This is where a lot of SEO work is still needed, and will still be needed for quite some time.

So I think Gray and Shoe might be talking about two different aspects of SEO. And the arguments both make are quite valid.

My two… what say you?