Is SEO Destroying Search Results?

Search results seem to be getting more irrelevant as the years go by. As SEO specialists find ways around search engine's algorithms, results become more and more out of line. Results on many searches tend to be overloaded with spam and/or third-party sites. Maybe one of these days, a new "ringer" will appear and become the much-needed monkey wrench.

If you search "pizza Philadelphia" on Google, the top result is Yelp. If I had really wanted Yelp, I would have gone to their site. But I will give them some credit where credit is due. The first pizza place, Pietro's, shows up at number 3 on the list. But if you try the same search on Blekko; "Good lord! It's affiliate and third-party central. I counted one actual pizza place on the first two pages. Wasn't it Blekko that made a big stink about Google's spam ridden results? Think I'd take a bit of spam over endless third-party and affiliate results.

Anyway, I was doing a lot of search engine research a few months back while doing a lot of cross referencing and I was surprised at the results. Just ran the same test again for three search engines.

Listed is the name of the establishment, search term and where the actual business site ranked for each search engine.

Pudge's: "Pudge's Norristown"
--Google: #2
--Blekko: N/A
--DuckDuckGo: #1

China Buffet: "China Buffet Havasu"
--Google: #4
--Blekko: N/A
--DuckDuckGo: #1

Tanuki Sushi: "Tanuki Sushi"
--Google: #4
--Blekko: N/A
--DuckDuckGo: #3

Brothers Landscaping: "Brothers Landscaping AZ"
--Google: #1
--Blekko: N/A
--DuckDuckGo: #1.

Golden Horseshoe: "Golden Horseshoe Havasu"
--Google: #4
--Blekko: N/A
--DuckDuckGo: #1.

Corropolese Bakery: "Corropolese Norristown"
--Google: #1
--Blekko: #2
--DuckDuckGo: #1

Now, here are results for searches on actual websites and where they ranked:

Sushipier1.com: "sushipier1.com"
--Google: #1
--Blekko: N/A
--DuckDuckGo: #1

Elcoquipuertorican.com: "elcoquipuertorican.com"
--Google: #1
--Blekko: N/A
--DuckDuckGo: #1

Geterplumbing.com: "geterplumbing.com"
--Google: #1
--Blekko: N/A
--DuckDuckGo: #1

Facebook.com: "facebook.com"
--Google: #1
--Blekko: #1
--DuckDuckGo: #1

Granted this is not a representative sampling but these results are similar to the results from a few months ago.

For all the grief that Google gets, they do a decent job overall. Some spam mixed in but usually the actual business is very close to the top.

With Blekko, who knows? They're out in left field picking daisies or something. How could you not have a result for an actual website? They wind up deferring to Bing. It's pretty apparent when you page through their results on many search queries, excessive third-party and affiliate results.

Again I was surprised with DuckDuckGo. They may not have all the "bells and whistles" but their search is pretty darn good.

In closing, there are issues with search results being overloaded with spam and/or third parties.

Is SEO destroying search results? Maybe or maybe it's just the case that the perfect algorithm hasn't been discovered yet.

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