Thoughts on RankScience?

[LoganRay]

I'm sure most of you have heard about this startup, RankScience, that has big ambitions to disrupt the SEO industry with their automated (I know I know...the word 'automated' and 'SEO' in the same sentence!!!) optimization software. Their claim is that by running thousands of congruent A/B tests on your site, they can maximize rankings and organic traffic.

Initially my thoughts were "oh crap, there goes my (and a lot of other people's) career". But then I started thinking about it a bit more and realized a couple things. First, software can't replace a face-to-face client meeting. Being in an agency world as most of us are, client interactions are vital to a sustained partnership. Second, someone is going to have to understand what this software does, configure it, and monitor it, and I'm ok with that being part of my job if that's how the industry shifts. Third, and most importantly, in theory this software has the capability to reverse engineer search algorithms. If they had the data of 10,000 websites using their platform and are collecting data on what works and what doesn't, it's only a matter of time before they can pick apart the algorithm piece by piece to figure out exactly how it works. Google is obviously not going to like that very much and will almost certainly right the ship.

That's my 2 cents, looking forward to what your thoughts are on RankScience and the future of our industry.

[willcritchlow]

Hey Logan. Just saw this - sorry for the v slow reply.

As you might know we (Distilled) are working on A/B testing as well (I wrote a bit more about it on moz here).

From our perspective, as a well established agency, we have built our tool with agencies and experts in mind. We see it as a tool for experts to use (our consultants, marketers on the client side, and other agencies). I wrote a bit more about how split testing is changing our consulting work here - but in short I agree with you that consulting skills and client management skills are going nowhere.

As for Google's view on the subject, any tool can be used for good or bad, but we believe that if you approach it the right way, this kind of testing is wholly aligned with Google's goals - our testing helps build better websites that are more closely-aligned with searcher intent and so we think that the general approach is one that forms a great part of a balanced search strategy.

[silicon-valley-startup]

We used RankScience for SEO A/B testing and found a few big winners that were impressive but ran out of things to test after about a year. My understanding is they're focused more on NLP Content Optimization software now.