The end of SEO as we know it
 

I've written a piece about (near) future trends in SEO, reflecting the current developments in artificial intelligence and its impact on search engine technology.

In a nutshell: the technocratic view on keywords and backlinks will lose significance in favor of content value and context. Joei Chan has interviewed a couple of marketing guys and has got interesting answers. Worth reading.

It's an interesting question how this development affects the adult market. Discussion, please.

Is AI already in a point that it can read content from several articles and decide which is the best one? (and not just because it had the same keywords you were searching)

Interesting, it is getting smarter and harder to cheat.

Determining "the best one" of something is very subjective; you would have to tell a software system what 'bad', 'good' and 'better' means in a given context. But things like extracting content and creating context (what's a text about?), detecting relationships between items (is this fact derived from another one?), pattern matching (does x belong to y?), and a general understanding of a message is already possible.

And yes, this makes cheating a lot harder. Just by using a bit of math.

I have tried to make a blog with a lot of text (300min.-1800max.). When completing new post I gathered info from all 1-2 pages in SERP and added a lot of edited photos (10-60). One post took me two days to complete on average. I had some traffic from Google for quite a while, but it went down to almost nothing this month. I have only few links from other pretty good blogs (contextual) with brand anchors.

I have no idea where is SEO heading...

This big paradigmatic change won't come overnight (too much knowledge went into common search engine technology), but I'm sure that AI will become an additional factor of scoring a site's value. Depending on the success of this method (it's still rather new), this factor will get more and more important.

This whole development is less based on classical AI research but on some seminal papers on neural networks and machine learning written by this guy. And fear not, we are not just at the mercy of AI, we actually can use it, too. Today, already, AI systems are creating music and (even pornographic) imagery. AI lets you answer questions like "what are my visitors are looking for and why" and "what set screw do I have to adjust for this or that effect". In the end, it's a matter of knowing how to do it, as it always is.

SEO's not changing. It's already all about contextual engagement. Google knows which keywords users spend time on your site for, and it ranks your site for them.

There's literally no better signal they could have; they already know, given a keyword, exactly how every site performs. There's almost nothing left for them to change.

So it just means that today and in the future, SEO is not about keyword density or backlink profile or anything else; it's about engagement metrics.

This is soooooo fucking confusing.... I have a whole thread on this shit in here (Q and A) but nobody is "biting"...:thumbsup

I love threads saying that: SEO is dead, Do not SEO your sites, SEO is obsolete, ...
Keep this up guys ;)

Who said it's dead? If it's the common 'watch your keywords and backlinks and, oh, buy my book' kind of SEO, then, well, this one might die slowly.