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Google As Vegas Casino: What Professional Blackjack Players Can Teach You About SEO

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Some time ago, I wrote an article on this blog about Google as Dictator. It made the front page of sites like digg and reddit and continues to be one of the most popular articles on this site.

The article drew an analogy between Google and a dictator describing the ways that if Google had such power, how it might use or abuse it. I'm a big fan of analogies (despite not being particularly good at them).

This is why when John Andrews wrote an article comparing SEOs to card-counters in blackjack, I was intrigued. This particular analogy hit home with me because there was a time in my life when I actually contemplated becoming a professional blackjack player. This was well before I ever went to grad school at MIT and well before I even knew there was an MIT blackjack team. This idea didn't last long, but it did rattle around in my brain for a bit. But I digress...

John makes some excellent points in his article, which I'd like to summarize and extend a bit (since I'm pretty familiar with blackjack and card-counting - and to some degree, SEO).

1. Google is the house and the house makes the rules. The only choice you have is whether you want to play or not, you can't really change their rules.

2. The rules are designed to maximize profit. Just like a casino, Google has an economic interest in designing the rules of Internet search so as to maximize its long term profit. Google is a for-profit company, so this should not come as a surprise.

3. Smart players reduce profitability. There is nothing illegal, immoral or unethical about counting cards at a blackjack table. Card-counters are not "cheaters". They simply play the game better than most others and are the rare case where a player overcomes the usual house advantage and actually has a mathematically demonstrated way to make money over the long-term. This is why card-counters get banned (once they are detected). Casinos don't like losing money. Similarly, really good SEO consultants (the smart ones) generally take profit away from Google (because they help their clients reach the market without having to pay Google for advertising).

4. The House Balances Tradeoffs When Designing Rules: Back in the early days of casino blackjack, once it was statistically shown that it was indeed possible to beat the game, the casinos tried changing the rules so as to eliminate even the possibility of a player beating the system. Interestingly, this ended up being sub-optimal. Seems that the illusion of a beatable system (despite the fact that so few players could ever actually do it) was necessary to get the players to play. This is akin to Google making the rules so draconian that they make absolute decisions as to who ranks and who doesn't. If they did this, and it became obvious, they risk losing their "players" (the millions of Google search users).

5. The key is to be smart and not appear smart. Given the point above, one of the hardest things about professional blackjack is not counting cards, but to do so without being obvious about it. This is exceptionally hard. The parallel to SEO is similar. You want to "optimize" your site, but not in such an extreme way that you get flagged for over optimization.

This last point deserves some expansion. The true art of advanced SEO is really trying to optimize a site without seeming unnatural. It's like sitting at a blackjack table, knowing what the "optimal" decision is (based on the card count) but choosing something that is sub-optimal, because the optimal decision will likely set off all sorts of alarms and suspicions.

Thanks to John for providing the analogy. If there are any other SEOs out there that also are blackjack fanatics, please feel free to comment.

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Sun, Sep 09, 2007 @ 04:19 PM