While driving up to HostingCon 2007 from Ohio, I had an odd moment of Zen regarding Google and search engines in general, which I shared with my business cohort Jamie Harrop, who was busy making blog posts from the passenger seat of my car (three cheers for Verizon Broadband Wireless!). For the sake of this blog post, I'm using Google as a stand-in for all major search engines - they've earned it by virtue of market share. If you don't like Google, substitute the search engine of your choice as you read on.
I have this vision in my head of what the war room at Google must be like, the types of discussions that take place, and the decisions that are made. I can just imagine the algorithm developers sitting down around a table to answer the same question they ask themselves every day: Has any Web site owner compromised the integrity of the algorithm, and if so, how? I often wonder exactly how these developers feel about the search engine optimization industry as a whole. I mean, they've set up a bunch of rules for behaviors they will and will not tolerate in SEO professionals, but I wonder if in their ideal search engine world, SEO is an obsolete profession. Even the most ethical SEO is still an attempt at producing site content/markup with the sole intent of manipulating rankings.
It's one thing to recognize the legitimacy of the SEO profession, and even to recognize its value. There's no doubt Google staff do both. I wonder if they like SEO. I think I may do a little investigating to see what I can learn, since I'm asking a question for which I do not have an answer. If you've had occasion to learn the answer yourself, please feel free to reply with it!
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