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Will SEO still exist in five years?

Will SEO still exist in five years? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

Kevin from Marseille in France asks: will SEO still exist in 5 years? Four people liked that question. 45 didn’t like that question – I’m still gonna 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, right? In the same way that you polish your resume, you figure out how to put your best foot forward, SEO tries to figure out how to put the foot forward for your website. So, 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 help make sure that all of your URLs get the backlinks they deserve, that you don’t have a lot of duplicate content. And so, there’s plenty of great things you can do as a developer or as an SEO to make sure your site is well represented and makes the right impression, it’s really useful for visitors. Those are all the great things that you can do. So, I think that as a practise 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 that pollutes or cloggs up the web, that will not be as productive. And so 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 an expert. And they can use self service tools like the webmaster console or other search engine’s consoles to, you know, help them out on SEO. But we provide a free SEO starter guide, it’s a 20page PDF, and we wouldn’t do that if we didn’t think there was some value to that, if we didn’t think there was some value to SEO. So, SEO doesn’t have to mean spam, SEO doesn’t have to mean black hat – SEO can help you to put your best face on your website just like you polish your resume. So, I think, it will be around in 5 years, and I don’t think that that’s a bad thing.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: