Google Gets Semantics – The End of On-Site SEO Optimisation?

In a recent post I analysed the content and SEO strategy of Sweaty Betty and noted that the company had included what I would describe as ‘SEO copy’ at the bottom on their product listing pages. This type of keyword-heavy copy is there simply to tell the search engines that the page is relevant for those keywords and is generally useless from a user perspective.

As I said in the article, I understand the need for SEO copy, since e-commerce sites tend to have, by default, pages which do not contain much textual content. This copy is just a fairly harmless way of telling search engines what the page is about. However, I also feel that we have come to point where writing copy solely for search engines is no longer needed, for two reasons:

Firstly, I believe that we should be creating content for customers, not for robots. Technical SEO is great for improving indexation and rankings but anything present on the site should be useful for users as well. Google has always said this and with the increase in people browsing the web on their mobiles – with smaller screens and slower internet speeds – every link, image and piece of text should be helping them to find what they need, not distracting them.

Secondly, I think that search engines, particularly Google, have reached a point where they can easily identify what a page is about without such text.

Don’t believe me? A good example which proves this was included in a recent article by Jon Evans at TechCrunch. The article talked about the differences between Facebook and Google in terms of how each platform identified which information is most relevant to the user. Let’s take a look at an ad that the author was served on Facebook:

Facebook has clearly identified Jon as an Arsenal fan and subsequently served him an ad which had the word ‘arsenal’ in. Obviously, the word has more than one meaning and Facebook does not yet understand this.

Google, on the other hand, seems to have a much better handle on semantics.

Have you ever tried to search for something that you didn’t know the name of? Check out the below example:

When searching for “that movie where no babies are born”, the first result in Google is the IMDB listing for Children of Men, which is almost certainly the film the searcher is looking for. Using Google Suggest you can search for “that movie where…” or “the music video with…” and get a lot of these kind of results.

The Children of Men page on IMDB doesn’t feature the search phrase anywhere, but Google still knows what the searcher is looking for by using a complicated mixture of anchor text, co-citations and any number of other signals that make up their ranking algorithm.

Context. Nuance. Semantics. Google gets them.

In my opinion, these search results suggest that Google has become so much better at understanding what a web page is about that we don’t need to spoon-feed this keyword stuffed text to the robots any more.

So, should you stop using this kind of copy on your pages? Well, it’s up to you, but first take a look at results for the same search on Bing:

Now, as I said above, I don’t condone creating content for search engines but if you are looking to rank well in Bing and these results are anything to go by, you might need to give them a bit of a helping hand.