Changes in Google's SEO

I have been deep into Google SEO for about 10 months now. I learn new information literally every day. One thing I havent really witnessed (at least I think), is any noticeable changes to Google's SEO criteria.

Have any of you guys seen many bif changes throughout the years? (for instance, I know reciprocal linking was huge last year, and even now --- however I hear penalties are being slapped on people whi engage in this).


What are the biggest changes you guys have seen throughout the Google years?

 

Google is giving more and more importance to the content rather than backlinks to provide quality search result to their users.

 

Absolutely - i think this is a trend that is going to continue in coming years, links less important content more important.

It makes sense if you think about it - ultimately it is you who is directly responsible for a sites content and you who should reap the rewards.

 

i think the content is more important. it didn't make sense that the backlinks were more important than the content of the site itself

 

If it was all down to links you could build bad links towards competitors to try to ruin their rankings

 

yes i agree content important without backlink it would not useful

 

this is what i feel too . google dislikes enormous amount of backlinks - particularly built over a short span of time .

 

Content is important but without backlinks a site will not be able to rank
well for competitive search terms.

 

I see blogs ranking much high than other traditional websites. I think that has to do with ever changing content!

 

Having quality content on blogs/sites is what can make you rank google as well as msn as coming trend

 

Authority websites like Wikipedia have become very important to Google. Also quality content of course.

 

Google has started giving more importance to content rather than backlinks and the number of indexed backlinks for all my sites has considerably gone down over the period, though I have steadily built up the links. Finally, content is the king.

 

I still think links have a massive part to play. You need content as well, but without the links you won't get far.

 

Well, I guess unique content is what Google likes most.
Unique content and backlinks are the most effective things to impress Google.

 

What I have learned about Google is that, if we add useful content in our site on regular bases, we surely will get lot of traffic from Google. Google really love new content.

 

I would have to agree here. Continuous weekly fresh content. A well thought out interlinking of related content is important in this.

Backlinks are still quite important though and you should always be looking to get them.

 

A cool thing happened the other day when google decide to raise the pr on one of my sites from 0 to 2. The site in question does not contain any text content only pictures, has about few back links(less then 5) and has not been updated it in at least a year. Oh and it's only one page but I am not complaining.

 

I have been in SEO for 6 years (since I was 12 ) and the most notable change was the one I hated the most, when google started giving more weight to generally trusted domain. So basically, a 20 word article that announces a new gadget released was ranked higher then on a good SEO'd website with 1,200 words written about the release of the specific gadget, a quality real article.

However, these changes didn't happen over night

 

In google's eyes, web2.0, community, social network(like digg, facebook) are more and more weighty.

 

In my opinion I think that Content is the most important factor to rank websites in Google followed by the Backlinks