Is Search Engine Ranking Really Dead?

At the end of last year Bruce Clay well published comments on the future of search engine optimisation was given a lot press. He made many predictions on the future of search engine optimisation more notably that ranking is dead. At first I could not truly understand what he meant when he said this. I also think this is a very bold statement.

Let’s take a quick look at how he came to this conclusion. With the ever changing landscape of search engine optimisation and the way search engines in particular are showing results is changing the way we receive results.



In particular Google have made a lot of changes of late and if Google changes then you better take note as with Google been the most popular search engine on the planet anything they do will have an affect of the way professional search engine optimisation companies operate.

So what changes has Google made? If you are not familiar with search wiki or you don’t have a Google account you may not have seen what search wiki is. This gives you the ability to remove and move search results. If you feel a search result is not relevant to your search query or you think it is spam then you can remove it. You can also move a good result to the top. Google has said this will make no difference to the search results. You have to be logged into your Google account to use this feature and many people say that is the sticking point for this service becoming popular. Although according to comscore there is 113 million Google mail accounts out there so I would say that this service could become very popular indeed. This is one of the reasons that Bruce has said ranking is dead.

The other two main factors that makes Bruce come to this conclusion are preferred search and local search. Preferred search gives you personalised search results based on your search history again you need to be logged into your Google account to see these results. Finally you will also have to put local search results into the mix this gives you results based on your geographical location.

I think you still need to have a strong relevant site for your website to even be seen within these results so traditional search engine optimisation still needs to be your bread and butter.