A lot is said or written about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), but I would like to start a debate about SEO value to the users of the World Wide Web.

Surely the company that spends the most on SEO gets to the top of the search engine results?

Let’s look at an example, go to www.google.co.uk and do a search for maternity clothes. Look at the first page all the sites are big high street brands. But 18 months ago it was totally different, there where 5 large high street brands and 5 smaller business. Some times now www.affordablematernity.co.uk (one of the smaller sites, who where fourth on Google 18 months ago) makes it into the top ten for a day then drops back to page one.

So the large high street brands that can afford a large SEO budget can take over the front page at the expense of the small sites. So what does these mean to the user of the World Wide Web? Does this mean that if they want to look at natural ranking rather than sites that have been optimised to the max, they should start looking at page two and ignore the results on page one? But as more sites spend money on SEO may be people you start searching at page 3 or even 4?

If we go back to the example www.affordablematernity.co.uk is a SME which sales maternity clothes cheaper than the sites listed in Google on the front page for the search, so are the users getting value for money. Or should the smaller sites spend money they don’t have on SEO?

My Conclusion

Google really changed the web for the better in my option, but by allowing large companies to manipulate the search results, the web is now the survival of the richest. Google and other search engines need to regulate this or the World Wide Web will loose its value to user who use search.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 10:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.