Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

From these chaotic beginnings, search engine optimization matured and evolved as search engines became more sophisticated to screen out this kind of overt manipulation. Google makes at least 600 changes to its algorithms each year in an attempt to surface and prioritize the most useful information.

And yet the last few years of content marketing have had a similar dynamic at times. Some content gets published purely for search engine optimization. When every content marketer follows the same SEO checklists, all content can start to look the same.

It will be interesting to see the impact of the latest search engine advance. In 2015, Google announced RankBrain, an algorithm learning AI system, that is designed to think more like a human in ranking sites. It’s already the third top ranking signal....