Ed: For those still practising the dark arts of Search Engine Optimisation this platform is probably about 5 years too late. While Google is the only game in town at least in US & Australia, manipulating your pages to achieve SEO rankings just doesn’t seem to have the juice it did 5 years ago.

I can hear SEO people screaming. While I acknowledge there are some things you can do to really break your search engine visibility, I think the days of playing SEO games are going away.

Only this morning I received a message from Google Webmaster telling me that they couldn’t crawl all my CSS and JS files due to a Theme upgrade and robots.txt rules. They know more about my site than I do.

I think SEO is one of those industries that Google will make redundant in their quest to extract maximum advertising revenue from a search page, already 1/2 the links on a Google search page are either sponsored or Google factoids via other sites.

Google knows a lot about your pages, their composition, layout, CSS, Javascript how well they are laid out, where the advertising is and if there is too much, not much is getting past them.

But that doesn’t mean these guys won’t have a good business for another 5 years, it will take a long time for the rest of the world to realise that SEO, once upon a time when SEO was the best way to earn new leads for my first business I would have liked access to a tool like this.