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There’s no doubt in SEO circles anymore that Google (and probably their major contenders Yahoo!, Live etc. as well) are deploying a lot of human brainpower these days to tweak their search results. Gone are the heady days of geeky hype when the folks at the Googleplex insisted that their algorithms were so all-powerful they could cope with just about any form of search engine spam, if not immediately at least in the long run. They couldn’t – so enter human Quality Rater staff.

Judging by our conversations with prospects and clients it seems that this is still far from common knowledge outside the SEO industry – seems that the earlier techno-utopian “our bots can sort it all out!” ballyhoo has stuck quite persistently.

Well, if you too happen to be in doubt, feel free to check out the sources referenced below. There’s more but this little list (by no means comprehensive) should suffice to illustrate the point. In more or less regular intervals, even copies of Google’s internal Quality Rater Guidelines tend to surface and float around the Web, so…

Ok, so none of this is really new. However, we find little reflection on the implications this actually has on search engine optimization proper. Obviously, it would be inane to adopt the alternate extremist view, namely that just about every search result has been handcrafted. There’s still massive amounts of technology in place so a prudent use of reverse engineering still makes a lot of sense.

Still, from a business perspective, it only stands to reason to assume that SERP hand jobs will still constitute the exception, not the rule: else, the costs would be far too prohibitive. There’s legal priorities to take into account as well: the media, shareholders, PR spin doctors, law enforcement agencies and even politicos don’t take too kindly to undue amounts of porn spam being pushed to the front no matter the search term. Web sites featuring malicious code to infest their visitors’ computer systems with have to weeded from the index. Beacons of democracy and free speech such as China, Singapore, North Korea, Iran and Germany keep insisting on Internet search censorship which has to be attended to or else, etc.

Moreover, not all “search engine spam” (as the now-common albeit erroneous term goes) is created equal. Spammers are only interested in money making opportunities so niches with the highest perceived ROI, especially the classic PPC (”pills, porn and casinos”) markets are being targeted far more intensely than, for instance, sectors with lower perceived ROI and, hence, less competition. This, of course, is the reason why savvy marketers started going for long tail keywords years ago, following the path of least resistance.

So human quality rating does have its severe scalability limits. With billions if not trillions of Web pages out there vying for eyeballs, editorial control can only achieve so much – vide the loads of low quality irrelevant search results we’re still getting across the board. Still, it’s there and it’s definitely something to be reckoned with.

From an SEO consultant’s perspective all this implies that SEO has turned very much into a class issue: like search engine spam, not all niches and markets are playing in the same league.

If you’re working the online gambling or finance sector, you’ll be well advised to adopt an entirely different optimization strategy (typically far more resources and cost intensive) than you would, for example, when being tasked to promote some Cumbrian folk singer’s amateurish web site or their broken MySpace page. Conduct some minor on page improvements and throw a couple of decent links at the latter, and you’re set. Restrict yourself to the same approach with the former, and you’re toast… When you’re dealing with machine algos and human editorial whimsy, it’s an entirely different ball game, and you’d better know it.

In a nutshell: There’s simply no one-size-fits-all SEO strategy anymore. (If there ever was, but that’s another story…)

So what are these new rules of engagement, then? Well, some reliable constants abide, the chief one being that the search engines certainly won’t tell you. Thus, it’s the old trial-and-error game all over. Nothing new about that either.

Except for one thing, maybe: In SEO, like in almost any other industry, specialization is most likely the way to go. Come a time when, as a customer working multiple different market spaces, you’ll need multiple specialized and experienced SEO agencies as well: while one may know all about “online gambling” promotion, the other may assist you in pushing your “real estate” sites, whereas effectively optimizing for “credit repair” or “travel in Asia” may require yet another different skill set and technical backend.

It’s beginning to happen (e.g. when many SEOs started specializing on pay-per-click promotion or, somewhat later, on link building) and we’re bound to see a lot more of it further down the road. Focus is key.

Resources

“Introduction to Google Search Quality”

“Search evaluation at Google”

Philipp Lenssen: “Updated Google Quality Rater Guidelines”

Brian Ussery: “New Google Spam Recognition Guide for Quality Rater Reviewed”

Barry Schwartz: “The Google Quality Raters Handbook”

Aaron Wall: “Spying on Google: What is Spam? What is Relevant? Read This to Find Out”

“Full Text of Google’s General Guidelines for Remote Quality Raters from April 2007″

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