Web Analytic Matt

Automating SEO, SEM and Web Analytics
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing on October 13th, 2007

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There are 2 things that have sparked off this post.

1. The first is that while at work I managed to prove that our SEM strategy is less than optimal but that to fix it on such a large scale would require immense automation.
2. The second was an article I read about a day later reviewing Yield Software which hypes itself as a Google optimizing service

Now, the review is highly critical and pessimistic about the service and I have also read similarly negative reviews of the concept of automating SEO.

However I think that everything to do with optimizing your rankings in Google is possible to automate given a very skilled programmer and a lot of time.

A few years ago when I first came into contact with the theory of online marketing, as a programmer I thought, “why is all this SEO stuff not automated?”. I then later found that much of it is using software like WebCEO and IBP, together with bid automation tools for SEM, would it be much of a stretch to combine these tools, along with behavioural targeting and page optimization tools like Google Optimizer to make a people and search engine optimized site? I don’t think so.

But what about when Google changes it’s algorithm?
As that question states, we know that Google mainly works off one or more algorithms, so surely you can write an algorithm to optimize for Google’s?

SEOmoz wrote a great example of how to test a search engine algorithm on a simple scale. Basically it uses a random domain name with random text and random links, you then modify the elements that you wish to test and as a result you see how well each of the pages perform in the SERPs (search engine result pages). So, if you had a number of these tests up running there is no reason why you could not use the resulting information to feed your ‘worker’ algorithms that optimize your sites.

The only thing that cannot be automatically optimized is written content. Now, you can certainly have huge database driven websites and optimize them quite automatically but if you have a marketing site then chances are you will have to write some content that will appeal to your visitors. You could get an algorithm to write your optimized content first using a complex Markov chain which would be ok for search engines but you would need to ‘fix’ it to make it human readable.

Some more examples of similar things being done by less than white hat SEOs are control pannels where you enter your domain and some scripts create content, link to it from other sites like social bookmarking, blogs and other domains owned by the user. Personally I think that without looking at Yield Software it is difficult to tell exactly how their system works but I imagine its probably a paid version of one of these control pannels fed by testing domains.

So is it black hat?
I don’t know if their methods are black hat, but i’m sure that if it works then the search engines will make using the software non-compliant with their T&Cs, thus making it black hat.

In conclusion
It’s an ambicious idea and I like it, if they have pulled it off then fair play and anyone that doesn’t use them will dissapear from the SERPs, and it will make SEOs very unhappy and very poor.