If you have a Google account, you’ve probably noticed the new buttons on your search results:

What do these mean for the future of search engine optimisers? Well, it seems Google is finally yielding to the fact they can’t create the perfect algorithm, they still need human input. Whilst there is no official line the promote or remove buttons will have any effect on a website, it’s only a matter of time before Google use the data and the SERPs will start to produce results based on promote and remove.

And why not. It will encourage businesses and website owners to create useful content, and hopefully banish spammy sites to the black hole. Just think about all the crap websites you currently have to sift through that just happen to be good at SEO, but provide no real value, this is a way to reduce them.

Will the system be gamed? Of course we’ve already heard the urban myth of SEO agencies outsourcing to China and having lots of people search for and click on their websites across internet cafes, so you’d assume this would be the next step. Except they’ll each have to have their own Google account, no big drama, but the different accounts would need to register a different promote and remove vote from different IP addresses, meaning one person would need to login to one account, promote or remove, then go to another internet cafe, login to another Google account, perform another promote or remove and so forth – not time effective at all. I’m sure if a heap of different accounts were promoting and removing the same websites from the same IP address Google would notice (at least I hope they would!). Or I guess you could have a range of IP addresses and move around from computer to computer for different accounts – not an easy setup and I’m actually imagining it would seem a bit futuristic sci-fi. It would be cheaper to just create some decent content…I can’t imagine it would be worth the investment for the outcome.

So, fingers crossed for Google working the promote and remove feature in their search engine results.