Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash.
Do you ever wonder how often the local weather forecaster gets it right? Or how accurate the average political pundit is when she predicts not just the winner of an election, but the margin of victory? It’s very difficult to find that kind of information.
We got to discussing these ideas the other day because it related to something very specific that was brought to our attention, namely how often SEO firms and others involved in online search and marketing have predicted doom and gloom (or fame and fortune) for those who try to follow some particular Google algorithm manipulation strategy.
Our discussion—and any data related to it—was totally unscientific. We weren’t counting the number of articles or attempting to quantify how accurate any particular prophet was (or wasn’t), but we began to notice a pattern right away: not only were most (if not all) of the predictions proven wrong over time, but almost no one ever spoke of them after the fact.
In that way, this is just like the weather* and elections: everyone puts out their guesses in advance, but almost no one ever talks about them afterward. (An exception might be accurate election results: if someone gets it right, they’ll let the world know. But if they get it wrong, we’ll probably never hear about it again.)
One of the most interesting—but badly wrong—articles we looked at was a piece from several years ago that predicted a tumultuous future for internet search in general, but also the impending and inevitable demise of Google itself. That specific forecast was built on a short chain of predictions and assumptions on how consumers, search engines, web content, and the internet in general would continue to develop in concert; each prediction was predicated on shaky assumptions or wishful thinking, leading to an accumulation of incorrect predictions that put the final one entirely out of the reality ballpark. We’re not going to name names, but several years later that post seems to be an especially prominent case of “I wish I hadn’t written that.” That author continued to make similar predictions for several years, including a more recent one foreseeing a collapse of online advertising and the near-term demise of all free search engines in favor of a paid-search model: as you might suspect after a quick glance around our reality, that was also very wrong.
We’ve discussed aspects of Google’s algorithms before (here, here, and here).
But we haven’t been in the business of prognostication: these posts are descriptive, with the goal of explaining what’s going on, not trying to guess what it holds for the future of search. We strive to be factual and informative, not predictive and speculative. That’s what your customers and readers expect from your site, and that’s the kind of content we focus on providing to our clients. When you need clear, informative, original content for your site, turn to Waltham WordWorks. We’ll deliver.
*We’ve done weather forecasters a disservice above: that was useful to make the point, but we shouldn’t lump them in with other unscientific forecasters. Meteorologists aren’t simply guessing at next weekend’s weather: they’re making a probability-based forecast, informed by centuries of accumulated knowledge, using extremely sophisticated models that leverage enormous computational power. They are, if you’ll allow us to stretch the metaphor, much more like Google’s algorithm itself than those who try to make predictions about its behavior.
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