The Tyranny of the SEO Church, Revisited
An interesting post over at Hacking Christianity for Christian webmasters, looking at search engine optimisation and the church. This follows on nicely from a post yesterday about the religious blogosphere, in which I wrote:-
The truth is, whether for good or for ill, the Internet is a medium that the Church must master and utilise, as a matter of priority.
Any half decent webmaster knows that search engine optimisation is absolutely critical to the development and ongoing success of a website. It is tragic how often I see aesthetically pleasing Christian websites that are dead in the water, because they have been solely designed for the human eye, at the expense of the search engine’s eye.
All websites must be designed for two types of readers, human and bot.
A year ago on this blog, we wrote The Tyranny of the SEO Church where we examined how search engine optimization is becoming more and more critical for church outreach, but also cedes power to persons other than the church to answer questions. Read it here. Here’s the basic premise:
What it means to me is that any theological viewpoint that receives strong SEO (search engine optimization) can become the new “truth.” If you can get that viewpoint to the top of google searches, or better to cover the majority of the first page of results, then that becomes more and more “truth.” And this alliance between Wikipeda and Google can perpetuate this narrow viewpoint and bury (send to a lower ranking) theological viewpoints that do not agree with the SEO viewpoint.
Tags: Church Life, Internet & Technology