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FORGET THE LINK
When two Stanford Grads named Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally came up with the
concept of PageRank – a way to bring order to the digital world by using links as a sort of
vouching system – Google was born and the world changed forever. It was the ultimate
crowdsourced filing system. The more links a page has going towards it, the more important
it is deemed to be, and the higher it will appear in the results if someone types a relevant
query into Google.
Fast-forward 20 years and the web has changed immeasurably. It permeates our entire
lives, powers industries and has enabled a period of knowledge-sharing and human
progress unlike anything that has come before. Google’s search algorithm has evolved to
keep up, and now uses hundreds of individual measures (called “signals”), including
PageRank, to index the digital world. Although Google is still the most popular search
engine in the world new interaction models mean that, in many ways, the company has
never been less important for digital marketers – and PageRank’s days are numbered. To
understand why, you need to back up a bit.
THE INTERNET’S ORIGINAL SIN
Not long after Google launched and became the primary way people found information
online marketers got to work figuring it out, and how they could get their website to the
top of the pile. The answer, as laid out in Page and Brin’s Stanford paper “The Anatomy of a
Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine“, was links.
So links is what they went after, in any and every way imaginable. “Links” pages became
common, where site owners exchanged links to one another so they could both gain a little
more authority and improve their rankings. Webmasters routinely sold links on their sites
to others, sending blanket emails to other site owners with lists of sites, their PageRank,
and the price for a link.
At what will perhaps be remembered as the lowest point in the history of digital marketing,
firms set up thousands of WordPress sites linked together like a spider web to boost one
another’s authority, and used these artificially inflated sites to link out to their clients’ sites,
boosting their rankings.
These private blog networks, as they became known, were never intended for human
consumption and often contained little more than garbled text interspersed with the
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necessary links. An entire subterranean Internet developed that served no purpose other
than to game Google’s search results for those with the pockets deep enough to pay for it.
Ranking well in Google, and all the commercial success which came with it, had become a
numbers game. Build sites, build links, rinse and repeat. Whoever was the most efficient or
had the most marketing budget won.
Where there was obvious gaming of the system Google took action – “manual penalties” in
SEO-talk – and either massively reduced a site’s organic ranking, or nullified the value of
the links coming from the site. Algorithm updates and penalties are issued without warning,
and guilty parties often see their website traffic crater overnight.
In recent years Facebook has been forced to alter their algorithms in similar ways to redress
the balance, crippling sites which relied on viral hits for the majority of their traffic. For
many people Google and Facebook seem like utilities, but it’s worth remembering they are
private companies which make money when a user has a good experience, and they protect
those experience with a religious zeal. If you go out of your way to alter that experience it
won’t go unnoticed.
Although link buying and private blog networks were only a few years ago digital marketing
has improved immeasurably since those days (not least due to Google’s judicious use of
manual penalties), and today the biggest rewards can be had through creative thinking and
rigorous best-practice; not by building the most links.
The move away from links as a measure of digital marketing success has been a long time
coming, but Google has been putting out plenty of signals of its own that PageRank and the
age of link building is coming to a close.
A C U LT U R A L P R O B L E M
The allure of the link is so irresistible that every so often, through experimentation or blind
luck, the digital marketing community will come up with a new wheeze to build links. In the
past it’s been everything from hiding links in the footer of WordPress blog themes to
including them in embed codes for infographics. Every time these poor tactics become
widespread Google updates its guidelines to outlaw the practice – and will often drop the
hammer on a few of the worst offenders to make sure their point is heard. The most recent
incident was cracking down on bloggers accepting freebies in exchange for links.
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Google, of course, was the company which made the link so important in the first place.
The unintended consequence of their success is that they are now the web’s police, and
have to employ people to keep the playing field level.
To appreciate why Google wants to end this cycle you must understand something of their
culture. Google didn’t become successful by manually tinkering with its search results to
make them perfect. At Google’s scale everything – absolutely everything – must be
automated. Without automation, a product cannot grow to billions of users. That’s why
AdWords is a self-serve platform, and why Google Maps users are encouraged to correct
errors themselves.
Google doesn’t want to be manually course-correcting every few months when the world’s
digital marketers figure out the next dubious way to outfox their competitors.
And the source of all these problems? The eternal quest for more links. Google has created
a monster, and it wants out.
T H E L A S T D AY S O F T H E L I N K
In the last few years Google has been more vocal than ever before about moving away
from links as an important ranking signal. It has admitted it has a search index in testing that
doesn’t use links as a signal at all, and in the last few years has spent over $1 billion buying
ten different social analytics, artificial intelligence, neural network and natural language
processing companies. All of these acquisitions point towards new ways of analysing and
indexing the web, none of which necessarily involve links.
Neural networks (software which attempts to mimic the human brain to complete complex
tasks like speech recognition) and machine learning (software teaching itself to complete
tasks using available datasets) are particular areas of success for Google, as illustrated by
DeepMind’s victory over Go grandmaster Lee Sedol. This is, in large part, due to Google
having access to the largest corpus of training data in the world – the public internet.
In early 2016 Google – usually highly secretive of the inner workings of its search algorithm
– announced that an artificial intelligence system was handling around 15% of new queries
(searches which have never happened before) with remarkable success by guessing what
people were searching for if it didn’t understand the language used.
Natural language processing is also an area where Google is innovating. This work launched
to the public with the Knowledge Graph in 2012, which returned the answers to complex
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questions rather than just a list of pages. Conversational queries and voice recognition
improvements followed, meaning you can now have lengthy spoken conversations with
Google where it will infer information based on your previous questions.
Links, for now, still have a place in digital marketing (not least for navigational purpose and
to drive referral traffic) but the message from Google couldn’t be clearer. They do more
than just count links. They do more than just match keywords. Google’s AI systems are
reading, interpreting and understanding every public page on the web.
H O W W E F I N D I N F O R M AT I O N I S
CHANGING
Google, as of 2015, is no longer the largest source of traffic for most websites. That mantle
has been taken by Facebook. Recognising this trend, marketers are shifting more and more
ad spend to social networks. In the final quarter of 2015 social spend increased by 50%
year-on-year, while search ad spend increased only 8%. Performing well on Facebook is a
totally different art to ranking on Google, and it has nothing to do with links.
Facebook traffic is generated when conversations happen, and there is a more widespread
trend towards conversational interaction models across the web and mobile devices.
Rather than the traditional “list of options” that would appear whenever a text query is
typed into a box on the web, users are increasingly receiving a direct answer back.
Siri for Apple devices, Cortana from Microsoft, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant are all
designed with conversations in mind – ask a question, and get an answer. More recently
artificial intelligence-driven bots from Facebook and others have attempted to translate
these interaction models into direct connections with businesses. Some, including Viv, an
AI bot from Siri’s original creator, include transactional layers allowing a user to ask a
question (“Can you order me a pizza?”), get a response (“Would you like a large
pepperoni?”), provide additional information (“Yes, deliver it to my office.”), and complete
the purchase (“OK, it’s on the way!”) all without typing a thing or reading a word.
These interaction models are even doing away with screens, with devices like Google
Home and Amazon Echo which are exclusively voice-powered.
With more people using Facebook as their primary method of finding information, and
voice-driven interaction models forecasted to grow 10% year-on-year until 2019, there are
more ways than ever that aren’t search results to connect with an audience and find new
customers. And links? They don’t matter to any of them.
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BIGGER AUDIENCES  SUCCESS
When it comes to attracting visitors online, publishers are consistently the best in the
business. It has long been the mantra of digital publishers that success means a huge
audience. As the value of each reader continues to fall, more and more eyeballs are
required to generate the revenue needed to maintain a publication. But none of the world’s
biggest publishers can make it work. The Daily Mail, Trinity Mirror group and The Guardian,
the three biggest online newspapers in the UK, have all seen plummeting profits, and often
annual losses, most years for the last decade.
Meanwhile niche publishers, targeting specific audiences and monetising in ways that don’t
rely solely on ad revenue, are flourishing. The Wirecutter, a website which is riding both the
niche audience and the conversational search wave, publishes product reviews with a
methodology and rigour you would usually associate with academia. The website answers
questions like “What are the best wireless headphones?” with such authority that its owner
claims it drives around $150 million in ecommerce revenue by way of Amazon affiliate
links. This revenue covers the cost of 60 staff, and the site is profitable.
For many companies chasing more visitors means appearing higher in search results – so
the conventional wisdom is to create more links. But for many successful publications,
organic search traffic is a small blip on their radar. BuzzFeed – posterchild for the digital
publishing revolution – gets 75% of its traffic through social sources, with search making up
a sliver of the remaining 25%.
Instead of chasing increasing visitor numbers, more and more businesses are learning to be
smarter about connecting with the audience they already have – and again, publishers are
leading the way. Some are building high-retention mailing lists like The Skimm, experts in
specific verticals, like The Information, are offering valuable insights behind a paywall, while
others are bringing their audience together in real life for conferences like BlogHer from
She Knows Media, a network of women’s lifestyle publications.
User experience and conversion rate optimisation play a big part in this equation. A website
needs to be pleasurable to use to keep visitors coming back, and how you want your
audience to engage needs to be simple, and contribute towards your overall goals.
It is becoming increasingly clear that it’s not the size of your audience that matters, it’s how
interested they are in what you’re saying, how trustworthy your voice is, and how simple
you make it for them to engage with you on their terms.
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DING DONG, THE LINK IS DEAD
The link will continue to be the primary navigational tool for the digital age, and will most
likely continue to be a ranking factor for the foreseeable future. But it’s time as the primary
measure of popularity and authority is coming to an end, and indeed may have arrived
already. Matt Cutts, former Head of Google’s Web Spam, the group tasked with policing
what is and isn’t acceptable linking, famously said:
“Don’t chase after Google’s algorithm, chase after your best interpretation of what users want,
because that’s what Google’s chasing after.”
Although the quote is from 2011, it’s just as relevant today. Building links and getting
visitors used to be equally weighted sides of the digital marketing equation. Now they’re
both tiny parts of the overall digital marketing calculus, and focusing religiously on either is
to the detriment of every other variable.
Google’s own search data makes this trend clear – after a peak in 2011 searches for link
building have collapsed by almost 75%, with content marketing, user experience, social
marketing and influencer marketing all growing substantially.
https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=link%20building%2C%20content%20marketing%2C%20influencer%20marketing%2C%20
user%20experience%2C%20Social%20media%20marketing&geo=GB&date=1%2F2009%2089m&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT-1
Whatever platform you use to engage your audience and customers, chasing after what
matters to them (be it information, entertainment, the best products and service, or
something else entirely) is the best way to succeed in the digital world.
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