Whither SEO Fundraising in 2014?

There’s a problem with earth-shaking technologies: They don’t stay earth-shaking all that long anymore. Or, if they do, they don’t always shake in the direction we had in mind.

Technology changes fast and seems to change exponentially faster every day. Just about the time you get your mind around a new online phenomenon, it’s been revised, upgraded, rearranged or otherwise “improved” into something quite different than it was when you first discovered it.

Take search engine optimization (SEO). Not that long ago, when Internet search engines became the default way for most people to find information, organizations quickly realized that the higher they were ranked on Google, Yahoo and other search engines, the more visitors they would get on the websites. Higher rankings brought in better quality visitors too — visitors who were more likely to turn into donors.

The logical next step was to develop strategies and techniques that would raise their rankings. And thus SEO was born. It turned out that by using relevant page names, alt tags, text-based navigation and keywords, you could influence the search engines’ algorithms and drive your rankings closer to the top of the list.

So, over the last few years, organizations became better and better at optimizing their sites to push their names ever higher on search results lists.

And now just as we’re starting to get really good at it, SEO is changing — in ways that just might render all our ingenious and sophisticated manipulations irrelevant.

Here’s how Eli Parser, co-founder of Upworthy, explains it in his book, "The Filter Bubble":

"Most of us assume that when we 'google' a term, we all see the same results — the ones that the company's famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other pages' links. But since December 2009, this is no longer true. Now you get the result that Google's algorithm suggests is best for you in particular — and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google anymore.” (See him explain it in more detail here.)