Artificial Intelligence - The Final Nail in the Coffin of SEO

[EpicGlobalWeb]

There are claims about Google's new AI that will make backlinks and previous tactics obsolete as the engine "learns" what a quality website is.

From a programming perspective, however, this is curious to me. How will the engine "know" without being told? It has to be fed data. So to me, backlinks would still seem effective for this unless it is manually told what is a "good" or popular website thousands and millions of times. The concept of neural networks in computer learning is a potential danger to the SEO industry, but isn't now and wont be for a while.

What is your expert opinion of this?

 

[SEOPub]

My opinion is that people saying that are the same fools saying that social signals were major ranking factors and nonsense like just publishing good content will get Google's attention.

Links are still the most significant part of the algorithm. Maybe the AI will do a better job of qualifying links, but it is still going to need links to rank webpages.

 

[EpicGlobalWeb]

That is what I thought also. Someone on another forum posted Google's phone number and said to call them because I didn't believe what she said, which was basically that Google stopped considering backlinks because it knows people buy them.

But my guess is that very small percentage of Google users buy links. Only we do that sort of thing. I wonder what could replace the backlink.

My opinion is that people saying that are the same fools saying that social signals were major ranking factors and nonsense

Lol you hate those social signals so much.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

Technically, Google does not hate bought backlinks. The only thing they have actually said is that they have a probably with bought links for the purpose of manipulating PageRank.

They have actively mentioned directories like the old Yahoo directory and BOTW in the past. Those are bought backlinks, fairly expensive ones too.

Most of the internet revolves around bought links. Most ads you see on major websites are bought backlinks. If ESPN or CNN took nofollow tags off of all of their ads (actually, I'm not even positive that they use them anyhow), do you think Google would punish any of the sites involved for that? Of course not.

Now if you are buying links from a network like the old BMR network, that is different. That they have a problem with.

The whole bought backlinks thing is a bit of a grey area, and Google has really never publicly come down on paid links as hard as people think they have. At the same time, they have not made a major effort to dissuade people from thinking that either because it serves their purposes for the most part.

 

[EpicGlobalWeb]

As always I appreciate your expertise in this area and always look forward to learning about SEO from you. That being said, here's what I have to say about Google's purposes: