A few years ago, one of the hottest selling books in America was called ‘The Blockchain Revolution’. It detailed and explored this incredibly promising technology. True to its name, it forecast a revolution in almost every aspect of digital life.
Fast-forward to now, and the reality of blockchain is finally sinking in. Its huge potential can be easily seen by going on any crypto market and looking at the litany of coins able to be purchased, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, which have broken $60k and $4k, respectively. With Morgan Stanley and other massive banks starting to open crypto counters, it is all but guaranteed that blockchain is here to stay.
Despite everything, blockchain hasn’t really begun to impact the world of SEO, but it soon will in a way that changes how websites are designed and maintained forever. Its potential is vast.
Banishing Click Fraud
Have you ever heard of click fraud? If you’ve ever run a PPC campaign, you should have done! As PPC campaigns cost money by the click, a huge problem that tarnishes the multi-billion dollar PPC industry is when competitors and malicious bots simply click on a link repeatedly, racking up a huge advertising bill without yielding any benefit.
Enter blockchain, which has the ability to easily and instantly confirm whether those who click through to PPC ads have a legitimate interest and are, essentially, real people with real interest. Blockchain will also mean the end of the annoying Captcha requirements that some websites employ.
Bye-Bye Black Hats
If you went on the internet between, say, 2008-2010, you’d almost be guaranteed to find a site employing black hat SEO practices. These were originally incredibly basic, consisting most noticeably of keyword stuffing.
Nowadays, black hat link building is the biggest black hat SEO issue. However, it is also something that can be completely eliminated by blockchain technology. The strategies that black hats use today simply won’t work in an SEO environment with integrated blockchain technology – instead, only legitimate, white hat search engine optimization services will offer linking optimizations.
Smart Linking
Smart links are a promising technology, facilitated by Blockchain. Essentially, they are just normal links, but they track who shares them and when they get shared. The implications of this will mean that a site will have far tighter control of how inbound links are used and have far more data to inform their choices. As a result, SEO will become far more organic than ever before, with a greater sense of collaboration between content creators and online interactions.
More Positive, Valuable Content
Content is King, as Bill Gates said in the 90’s, but in a world of fake news, it can be very difficult for users to get real value from the content that they consume. This can damage SEO if a userbase doesn’t know how much they can trust the content and the websites that they visit. Blockchain will mean that websites are more transparent than ever and that genuine, trustworthy content creators can be identified as such.