Is SEO environmentally friendly?

Search Engine Optimization has advanced tremendously during the last 10 years and carries on evolving rapidly as more and more humans and businesses establish their presence on the Internet. It is needless to say how grateful companies and individuals seeing their revenues booming by being able to appear in the first page of Google’s SERPs.

As the need for investment in SEO grows, so does the competition between SEOs. With a vast amount of available tools and techniques, all digital marketers try to innovate and constantly be well ahead so they can carry on satisfying their clients’ increased expectations. It’s not easy to make clients understand that in Google’s first page there is place for just 10 (maximum) companies, let aside the fact that there isn’t any guarantee about how long a good position will last.

All that has resulted in a non-stop witches’ hunt as Google’s and the Web’s weaknesses have to be exploited to the maximum. The idea behind the web was to allow humans to share information between each other in a quick and reliable way. It was about interconnecting billions of USERS!

However, by allowing anyone to be able to publish, reliability and credibility lost their places. The World Wide Web consortium (W3C) definition of the web was:

“The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge”.

Then as search engines were getting more and more popular and with Google setting up the rules of the game based on links’ authority and relevance interpreted into votes, the direction was completely changed to what was originally planned.

• Numerous free and paid directory submission services. For the vast majority the sole purpose is not to be used by humans but just to be crawled by spiders and pass some link juice on.
• Millions of low quality articles that have been generated, not to be read by humans, but just to generate a bunch of links with manipulated anchor text back on some clients’ sites. Some of those articles are not even generated by humans, while some of the have been rewritten, re-submitted, re-spun and re-distributed tens, or even hundreds of times across the web.
• Tonnes of spammy blog comments which in most cases have been submitted just to get a couple of links back to a targeted site.
• Numerous higher quality articles, that if it wasn’t for the sake of getting 1-2 high authority links back to a clients’ site would not have ever been written ever.

It is very controversial how all the above can be characterised as “the embodiment of human knowledge”. The obvious question is to make, however, is how are all those actions affect the environment?

Google’s recent new index called Caffeine demonstrates clearly the consequences of all the above SEO practices. The following extract from Google’s blog is the answer to the question:

“Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.”

Source: Googleblog

So, Google needs a 100 million gigabyte database to be able to deal with all that content that not all of it has been created to be used by humans. It would be interesting to know how much part of the web all that spammy or bogus content takes up. And again, not all that content will be indexed by Google but it will still be sitting on a web server. Would Google need all those gigabytes to index a spam-free web? Definitely not!

All those ‘live’ gigabytes can be translated into an incredible amount of web servers being active 24/7. So, think of all those thousands (or millions) of motherboards, CPUs, hard drives etc that need to be produced, how many resources the manufacturers need, how much electricity is being used and how many carbon dioxide emissions all that produces. And this is just Google’s database.

Add to that all the hardware and power needs of all those web servers that actually host all that spammy content. How many tones of hardware will be scrapped once they will stop working? Where are they going to be dumped?

As far as I am aware there hasn’t been any scientific research taken place in order to shed some light on the actual facts. It would be interesting to get other SEO’s feedback on that, especially from those who are have are environmentally concerned.