Are There Any Good Keywords Left?

The answer to your query is that there probably are good keywords left but the trick as you know is finding them.

The rest of this article is a wry comment on keywords, the hunt for them, and the ultimate end of them.

It does not contain an outdated list of keywords containing the usual gems of misleading information.

Here's the article...

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History does not tell exactly when the last keyword was used. It is believed to be sometime in 2011 but no one can tell for sure. Certainly the analytic tools and linking systems suffered their first major crash around this point and the first serious internet outages occurred.

Many users put this down to government interference and the necessity to protect freedom of speech by terminating any use of it. But it was less sinister than that.

In a way Google and its willing army of volunteer writers had achieved the perfect victory over the written word.

In ten short years or so every possible combination of words had been used – in an attempt to monetise every single sentence, every phrase, every piece of writing known to mankind.

What a fantastic achievement it was.

Anything typed into a search engine was instantly available. Any combination of words would immediately result in thousands of responses.

It was now impossible for users to narrow a set of results significantly by simply adding a word, even if they could think of the right one. Endless choice of pages, all of them beautifully optimised to match every possibility.

By using its advertising model, Google had encouraged new writers to fill in all the gaps. Those writers who had sufficient knowledge could rise above those who just wrote and so the link and optimisation wars started.

• Person A writes about Cats.
• Person B writes about Cats and creates a link.
• Person C does two links.
• Person D copies the Cat article and does three links.

And so on, in a building of the Tower of Google, the all seeing all knowing, but ultimately all blind engine created a wall of garbage.

The actual content of the Cats article is of course immaterial. It may indeed be well written, articulate and interesting. But this is no guarantee of search engine attention. Unlike Terminator the machines are not that clever.

Count words, count links, count hits – job done. You can argue about the finer points of algorithms in the comments below but it is a blind machine leading the dumb by the hand towards the end of quality writing.

Hitting the top of the rankings is an achievement beyond those early writers such as Shakespeare who just wrote. In the new age of writing he would be on page 500 with his Hamlet offering, way behind the Fifteen Best Ways to Get Free Hamlet Ring Tones. Smothered in a layer of utter tripe, drivel and garbage the Bard would have put his pen down in despair. Maybe he would have just done a bit of blogging for fun.

The new top rankings are held by those who can fix the system - who have used a tool such as Market Samurai to optimise their prose for the right keywords. Writing is no longer a case of putting words down purely to provoke some thoughts or create an emotional response.

It’s all about money. The pursuit of it through the writing – advertising – reading loop, is leading to the end of the internet. Ten short years give or take. Adsense started in March 2003.

I exaggerate to make a point of course. There are still keywords around – the combinations of best, easy, cheap and so on are still possible for some topics. And by prodigious effort it is still possible to rank for some phrases. But what about the poor reader?

I remember the early days of the net – when you could search for something and find it fairly easily.

Someone would have written a page on the subject but the point back then was the subject, not the advertising.

They wouldn’t have needed to repeat the same keyword phrase multiple times, and you would have been unlikely to stumble across the same amount of poorly written rubbish as today.

It was a fairly quick exercise to search, read and be informed. Now it is completely different. Hundreds of similar search results to choose from with no guarantee that the first fifty you choose will be of any use. As a reader you try to get your search terms precisely right, in the hope that you will find your way to a decent page.

How many times do you give up in disgust these days? Too many adverts, too little content. A simple question left unanswered after minutes, sometimes hours of trawling through the garbage.

Just occasionally there is a real nugget of a page, where someone has put some effort in, knows and loves the subject – and can actually write in a reasonable way. But this is the exception not the rule.

Will the search engines be able to improve their offering? Just because a page has loads of links means nothing in my opinion – people can cheat. If the keywords match exactly it still means nothing. Every way that a spider or algorithm can find and calculate can be manipulated.

So the top pages will always be the marketer’s and manipulator’s pages, rather than the knowledge and quality pages. What does this mean for the future?

Does it mean that subscribing to ‘quality’ content sites is a way forward? Not really, if you have despaired at the lowering standards of ‘professional’ journalism.

I feel sorry for those trying to wade through the results on an iPhone or similar. Small screen, endless rubbish to scroll through. The next age of the internet will be interesting.

I should say that I don’t claim my stuff is quality. I don’t measure up to Wiki or professional writer standard. All I will say is that it is not copied, and there is some thought and effort put in. It may still be a disappointment to a searcher and I am sorry for that.

I am also adding to the massive pile of writing which in turn adds to the effort required to find that which you are looking for. My only small excuse is that occasionally people find it worth a read.

It’s a slim excuse.

Well it's funny or ironic how news replicates fiction sometimes. Or maybe the Google search engine changes were already in the back of my mind when I originally wrote this article.

Since writing this my traffic has almost disappeared due to the changes implemented by Google to get rid of content farms. Slightly strange because every single one of my pages is genuine hand crafted material. I happily admit it may not have much purpose but who out there is to judge? Certainly not the blind program that decides on rankings.

What is particularly amusing is that I naturally Googled for the algorithm change to see what was happening. And the first few pages of search results are almost all entirely the same reposted blog content from a single person. Now, that kind of duplicate overload is not really my idea of quality but obviously the search engine algorithm (how I love now being able to spell that word) - disagrees.

I have decided not to panic. I had virtually no traffic anyway, so from almost nothing to nothing is not so much of a drop. And with fingers crossed in a few days who knows - my output may start to climb - if the engine can recognise that words formed through care and attention are worth an occasional view.

Here's hoping!