Organic search results are important to entrepreneurs who wish to gradually build their business and take it to new heights. Integrating quality content with SEO techniques like backlinking, link building, long-tail keyword searches and more have always helped webmasters and business owners ensure high indexing in SERPs while creating a steady building block for a healthy future of their site. By using these techniques many have managed to rank their website naturally, without using shady practices like black-hat SEO or using paid solutions (i.e. synthetic traffic, likes or similar practices which are still widely used).
There had once been concerns about Google scrapping organic search results altogether in favour of paid results, as some tests in the first page of search results have shown in the past years. In 2012, one test ran an extra advert for a website which paid for high indexing, such as a credit card or similar site, which essentially pushed organic results down further. Back then, some SEO experts rightly chimed in asking whether these concerns were legitimate, and what the extra sponsored link in the front page meant. However, no official reply was given by Google as they simply indicated that they were running some tests to check the efficiency of new algorithms within their engines.
Many blog owners, providers of services, businessmen and entrepreneurs rely on organic ranking within Google and other search engines, and this change which has occurred against their favour will likely spell more disaster than any new qualitative search-algorithm. It is now a certainty that Google has scrapped organic SEO altogether in favour of sponsored results and other types of results.
Shooting Themselves in the Foot
Sites which are non-profit, like Wikipedia, have been providing quality content for a number of years and, despite huge popularity, still rely on analytics and organic word searches. A major part of building a succesfull website is optimised keywords and quality content, above anything else.
Back in 2010, a user reported seeing only as much as three organic results in one single search, though this was also admittedly a test by Google. The other results included a number of photographs and mostly sponsored links, which is the speculation of a number of SEO experts as to where Google wants to head in the future. Wikipedia was indeed one of the first three organic results, but this means that not many other sites will have a hope of competing against such a large project.
Now, it is obvious that organic search results are on the way out. For instance, the particular query terms for a website will not be shown anymore in Google analytics, something which is essential to any website owner in accurately determining which keyword to use, what long-tail search users type in to find that particular site and, as a result, how to provide better optimisation in order to rank higher and provide the search users want. All this will gradually be completely scrapped in a very short time, as SEO expers are seeing now already.
This change was implemented because of privacy reasons, at least according to official Google statements. However, Google are clearly shooting themselves in the foot by implementing these changes. Eventually, there will be no scope for varied content and very little choice in terms of what to read, purchase or look at. Gradually, only a bunch of sites could rule the online realm and it will ultimately not matter what users search for as essentially the same results will be churned out by the search engine.
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