Take only pictures, leave only footprints. Take care of your environment and it will take care of you. We've heard them all before, and many of us are tired of hearing statements like that, but in the new environment of search engine marketing we can reapply all the warnings, metaphors, and euphemisms and possibly create a new understanding in the industry.



The search engine environment is built on indexing and ranking algorithms, and as long as we work within the environmental constraints, both will survive, and even thrive, for a very long time.

Just as with other environments, as the search engine marketing industry continues to grow the level of pollution also also begins to rise. And as we optimize more and more, it becomes more and more difficult to find natural results. Which is not to say that you are finding bad or wrong results, just results that were built around helping you find them, not necessarily helping you find the information you want.

Pollution isn't good for anyone or anything. In the natural environment, pollution is a side effect of industrial growth. In SEM, however, pollution is often propagated as a means to grow an industry. And when pollution is intentional, and indeed the foundation of marketing strategies, it's going to be next to impossible to clean up.

As pollution builds it becomes harder to breath, your eyes start to sting, the trees begin to die, and the entire ecosystem or biosphere (or blogosphere) begin to degrade and collapse in on themselves.

And in both the search engine marketing and natural environments, pollution has a tendency to build on itself and fester in areas of apathy where no one acts quick enough to get things cleaned up.

Consider the hole in the ozone layer. This allows harmful UV rays to penetrate to the earth's surface. As certain detrimental gases build up in the atmosphere they continue to eat more of the ozone, creating bigger holes and letting in even more harmful rays.

SEO has had a comparatively long and varied career. There are appropriate ways to use it and inappropriate way as well. Those questionable activities do nothing but leave strange gases behind that only open up wider holes for other dangerous and harmful rays to sneak through. And once they've gotten through, the damage has been done.

Search engines are constantly working to block these holes and protect their environment. The harmful SEO practices, however, sneak as much through while they can, and spend their time and efforts trying to find or open the next hole when one of them gets blocked.

This is not healthy behavior.

If the environment is damaged seriously enough, we might not be able to repair it.

So we've covered the ozone holes – the things that let undesirables in – it's time to discuss the greenhouse gases – the things that keep undesirables from leaving.

Sometimes certain procedures and techniques work their way into the search engine marketing environment that may have been useful at some point but are now just clunky relics that are clogging up the system and building up high levels of pollution or the equivalent of global warming.

I know, I know. We're all tired of hearing about global warming everywhere we turn, but we're using it in a a different context here. If the search engine marketing environment gets too bogged down in old practices and surrounded by pollutants, the chances that new, innovative, clear and natural practices will climb to the top and help people find what they actually want become very small.

Environmentalism is a tough sell in the online world or the real world because it requires a certain level of personal responsibility. It also means that the industry profits will either be lower than one might hope, or simply take longer to achieve the desired results. It's hard to ignore profits in the present for the loft concept of a cleaner future.

And this, however, brings us to the biggest difference between search engine and real life environmentalism. The ideal Internet experience is a lot easier for the average user to grasp. They know when something is right and when something is wrong. And they will react accordingly. It's harder for a person who lives in Backwoods, Nowhere to worry about the ozone layer or GHGs when they've never actually experienced its effects. Bad Internet practices, however, are something they might deal with on a daily basis.

Take only pictures, leave only tracks. Work with the environment to help them encourage natural growth and powerful indexing and we might be able to create an environment conducive to truly natural results.