SEO is an inbound marketing technique used by marketers to drive qualified traffic to websites in order to promote a product or boost sales. Therefore, the message that is contained in a SEOed web page has a promotional intent. Now when people search on Google, they are not looking for advertising; they are looking for real stuff. But because of the horde of SEO professionals that have taken over the search engine with their promotional content, users will have to filter through Google’s results to identify and avoid promotional stuff which can sometimes be skilfully disguised as real stuff. In other words, because of SEO, using Google is pretty much like using a paid advertising search engine, only marketers had to pay an SEO professional instead of paying Google directly! This is why I call it spam.

Lets not forget that Google is first and foremost a huge advertising agency. Historically, it has provided great search results, but with the widespread use of SEO techniques by marketers, I fear its search results will become decreasingly relevant. Soon, a big advertising channel is all that will be left of the great search engine. It’s like a TV channel that offers 24/7 advertising, only you’ll have to do an extra effort of look for ads!