I despair. It appears that search engines are still rewarding dodgy SEO techniques. Frustrated by fluctuating Google ranking, I’ve recently invested some time in optimising the Yammer Web Design website to perform better in search engines. It’s not like I want to be number one, or anything, I’d just like to be found in a reasonable position on the results page for an appropriate search query, thereby getting a bit of quality website traffic.

So, what success have I had? Well, it’s difficult to say, as Google has been doing the Hokey-Cokey over the last couple of months. Good wholesome things, like providing quality relevant content seem to have limited success, whereas tinkering with page titles, headings and meta tags seems to have the best results. Sigh.

At the same time, as an internet user, I am regularly frustrated by search engines’ apparent lack of intelligence, when looking for quality information on a variety of topics. I’ve started to move away from search engines in order to find authoritative content. Search engines just aren’t good enough, and they will continue to mislead as long as they reward dodgy SEO techniques and inappropriate web page labelling. Scarily enough, I’ve become dependant on Wikipedia for information!

So, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place: do I concentrate on writing interesting, entertaining and informative content, or do I waste some of the time used on messing about with tagging in order to satisfy some secret computer algorithm which is liable to change on a monthly basis? The answer should be obvious, but without website traffic any growth in popularity will be slow, and it’s important to be found through search, before word-of-mouth and link popularity takes over.

Maybe the usefulness of search engines has reached its limits. Maybe paid-for services like Google Adwords are the only way for businesses, like a Bradford web design company, to be found in searches. Maybe search engines are just not viable for finding good quality content—rewarding popularity, dodgy optimisation and blind luck. Are search engines contributing to the “dumbing-down” of western civilisation we have seen over the last twenty years?