Future of SEO & e-Commerce in India
The future of organic SEO looks bright despite much hullabaloo about the changing behavior of search engines to go for PPC. By the time they go for full fledge paid inclusion program, they may loose their popularity. You may find verification of this argument in Overture. There has been a significant shift of searchers from overture to Google, msn, Yahoo, or other search engines.
In 2001, the controversy swirls around a revenue-producing aspect of search engines. Consumer Alert, a consumer watchdog, filed a complaint with the FTC suggesting search engines were changing the nature of their results pages. According to the complaint, instead of presenting results based solely on objective algorithms, the search engines were including results found by paid inclusion and paid placement. Consumer Alert requested that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigate whether these companies are violating federal prohibitions against deceptive acts or practices by inserting advertisements in search engine results without clear and conspicuous disclosure that the ads are ads. This concealment may mislead search engine users to believe that search results are based on relevancy alone, not marketing ploys.
Despite the explosion of paid placement sales as a source of revenue for search engines, users remain largely unaware of these issues. 62% users are not able to distinguish paid and unpaid results while 32% Internet surfers do understand them. But soon the figure is going to change. Further, if search engines do not produce relevant results the users trust, they loose their trust and hence their popularity dips down. Or who knows other engines may take advantage of their competitor's downfall!
