The Last 10 Years of SEO

There aren’t many of us in Sweden who have worked in SEO for more than a decade. Two (or three, depending on how you count) of us are at Brath. Because of that, we have some unique opportunities to look back at the SEO industry, and that’s exactly what we’re doing today.

I sold my SEO agency in the summer of 2007. It wasn’t for much money, and there wasn’t much of value in the purchase, but at the time, it felt important. A&M Sökmotokonsult, which was the start of my career, didn’t get swallowed up so much as it just faded away. Together with Stefan and Michael, I started building an SEO department at what would later become Pineberry. I had received a handful of cash and some shares in exchange for my time and what I had built under the name Sökmotorkonsult (you now recognize it as Pineberry’s blog).

Right now, I’m sitting at The Hollywood Roosevelt, looking out over a cloudy California. I’m here to relax and finally get some time for the things that matter most. By coincidence, it’s a great time to reflect on the SEO industry and what’s happened over the last 10 years.

The early years in the industry were filled with all sorts of strange events—plenty of half-scandals and even a few full-blown scandals. We won’t dive into the details, but we’ll skim through a few to gain some perspective on the industry.

The Phone Directories and “Business Secrets”

Here’s how it went: SEO emerged roughly around the same time that phone directories started to lose significant value. It’s kind of in the nature of things: search engines on the rise, search services on the decline. In the directory industry, there were all kinds of business owners, from large banks to outright criminals, and everything in between (if you could fit something in there). When business owners stopped saying yes on the phone to “listings in the directory,” it became “get visible on Google” as the new way to end a fax conversation.

The SEO agencies when I started ranged from charging for absolutely nothing, or for things that were outright harmful, to charging for rushed work or straight-up spam. There were exceptions, of course—some tried to deliver quality and succeeded, some tried and succeeded for a while. Others claimed to deliver quality but didn’t. Overall, you could say that the customer—the poor soul buying SEO—was essentially buying blindly. The “pig in a poke” is the least you could say. Often, you wouldn’t even find out afterward if it was a pig or not, because it was considered “business secrets.”

If we compare this to the present, I would say things are much better on this front. There are still some shady characters in the industry, but at least they hide behind better phrasing today. Often, it’s more about selling vaguer services and embellishing a little when talking about their own company, compared to the telephone-based sweatshops of the past. Fewer blatant lies now, more obfuscation.

2008-2010: The Gold Rush

Somewhere around this time, the real gold rush happened. While it wasn’t as easy to cheat the system, anyone who knew something about SEO had a bright career ahead of them.

It was straightforward, and results could be obtained easily across the board. Combined with the fact that Sweden was at the forefront of online gaming and gambling, where competition was rapidly increasing, the Swedish SEO industry became highly skilled.

It might have started a little earlier or tapered off a bit later. I’m not suggesting that it’s no longer possible to make a lot of money in our industry; rather, it’s just become more complex. A page, with keywords in the title, heading, and body text, along with strong backlinks and anchor text. That was basically the entire recipe. Then there were some finer details and different (good) ways to build those backlinks. Unfortunately, during a gold rush, opportunists inevitably start to appear.

As scammers were being weeded out of the industry, fortune-seekers began to show up in relatively large numbers. This is something we still deal with in the industry today, unfortunately—suddenly, everyone and their uncle became an SEO expert. It has turned out that you can get by as an SEO “specialist” just by having a sharp tongue. I can easily name nearly half a dozen mid-sized agencies that completely lack SEO expertise (or only have very junior knowledge). It’s surprising how little some people know.

On the whole, things have improved somewhat today, but in some ways, it’s easier to get away with being a quack. Bloggers (myself included, perhaps) who actually used to scrutinize the SEO industry have largely gone silent. Some say this is because the industry, or maybe the bloggers, has matured. I’m not sure about that; I think, unfortunately, some voices have been silenced simply because they can’t be bothered anymore. Nowadays, there’s almost no one left to scrutinize SEO agencies, but that wasn’t the case back then. Perhaps the need for oversight was greater then.

The Echo Chamber

What followed the gold rush years is what people in the US often refer to as “the echo chamber.” Not just in Sweden but around the world, there is a built-in (psychological) problem with SEO: Everyone who hears about SEO suddenly becomes an expert who blogs and tweets about it. These people then lecture at conferences because, after all, they tweet so much about the subject that they must be experts. The problem is that no one at the conferences understands SEO, so they end up learning some sort of misinformation, which then leads to them being the next people to tweet and blog about SEO.

No one tests, no one does the actual work, no one practices real SEO. They just parrot the nonsense they read on someone else’s blog, heard at a conference, or simply made up because “it seems reasonable that social signals are part of Google’s algorithm.”

Here we are today. In my eyes, more snake oil is being sold in our industry than ever before. PowerPoint presentations talking about likes, shares, machine learning (which is actually used by Google, but how on earth do you apply it in your SEO?), and more and more vague concepts. The problem is that some answers need to be vague, while others need to be crystal clear. There are far too few in the industry who are well-grounded enough to know when to apply one approach and when to lean on the other.

Intentional complicating of messages in order to make them harder for unauthorized parties to interpret (idg)