SEO: enjoying the futility

Last week I had some fun writing a rant about SEO, and the neverending changes needed to achieve some ranking in search engines. Making the comparisan between the myth of Sisyphus and optimising for SEO was an enjoyable exercise and a great way to let of some steam.

Of course, frustration with the endless SEO work is more a choice than it is a fact. Especially when you consider Albert Camus' essay on the myth of Sisyphus, creatively titled 'The Myth of Sisyphus'. In which he concludes the following:

 The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

And this will be the part I'll focus my attention on.

What is the struggle?

In Camus' essay, the struggle is the search for meaning in life. His conclusion reflects that this search in itself is the meaning. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, not because of his struggle, but because of the meaning the struggle gives him. If he were to ever reach the summit, and his boulder wouldn't roll down, his struggle ends. And with his struggle ending, so does his meaning to continue.

We can apply the same logic to the sisyphean task of growing and mantaining SEO ranking. As long as the arms race between search engines and marketeers continues, both have a place in this world. Both of them have a reason to exist.

If either one of them would give up on their struggle, both would lose the reason (and meaning) for their existance. Instead of Sisyphus having the lone task of rolling a boulder up a hill, they each have their own boulder on a shared hill. And whenever one reaches the summit, they push the other's back down.

It might seem childish and meanspirited, but in this act, the both provide eachother with the struggle to their their hard. They will curse at eachother, but one must imagine them smiling on their way back down.

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