Is it me, or is it that everytime, we hear Google is doing something with their search preferences and all that... its never good. This will hurt us SEO's even more.... You can read the full article at our blog- http://talkresults.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/is-google-killing-seo/ But here's a piece You may not be happy with this... Its Google again, and well, it looks like this time they’re trying to kill SEO. We received the email 3 days ago from Clicksor, and this is what it states: In March, 2004, Google released a beta version of Personalized Search service on Google Labs that allowed users to refine search results based on their interests. At the time, only users with a profile and an account can reshape their search results. However, Google have announced that they are expanding this service to signed-out users as well, which has caused a lot of uproar in the SEO community.
all they are focusing on is on promoting positive user experience. in an attempt of dong that, they are working hard to make it as challenging as possibe to manipulate the search results. its nothing against SEO itself, you you follow the rule and practice SEO methods that are legit, then it would still work. just those days easy ranking with simply the number of backlinks are over. quality in terms of both content and backlink rules now
I guess both of you made valuable points, positive user experience is a good thing. But not everyone's happy about it.
Spamming, dirty tricks and one time SEO will no longer work. You need to be a lot more progressive now and keep on the SEO work. Changing titles and descriptions keep the pages fresh and look in your logs for trends and focus on these.
I agree. And they should. Google's algorithms are designed to give the results that they feel are the most relevant. Realistically, even white-hat, above-board SEO is intended to manipulate search results in our favor. As webmasters, our interests and Google's interests are not necessarily identical.
It's definately an interesting time to be working in SEO. Jim you are right, all SEO is designed to manipulate results in their favor, however there are also plenty of great sites out there that never get found as they don't have enough incoming links etc. Personally I think it's sad that anyone has to focus on tasks like "linkbuilding" rather than just developing quality content for their websites, but thats the world we live in despite all google's rantings about "content is king" and "focus on content".
Well, this is the way Google has been following since... whenever they were founded. And it's a good thing. People seem to be so obsessed with their SEO tactics that they seem to forget what the purpose of a search engine is: Getting the most relevant sites for their users. Not to get them crappy made-for-adsense sites or hundreds of fake review sites. The better the google algorithm gets, the more difficult it becomes for the spammers and 'marketers looking for a quick buck' to make a living. Only serious marketers thinking long-term will survive. I fully support Google's every move to improve their SE.
Most successful SEO's don't follow the google guidelines 100%, even if they are marketing real, genuine businesses. There are too many others with both high and low quality sites playing the system and beating them to make this a valid tactic!
Google to SEO people: "You didn't think it would be that easy did you!?" SEO people: "You know, for a second there, I kinda did." Heh, but seriously. the SEO business is all about innovative tricks to raise your rank. Google's system is constantly evolving to make it harder to manipulate. This way the smart SEOs are not put out of business by oceans of spammy, incompetent ones. I love that Google does this kind of thing. Helps keep the game interesting
Yeah, as long as you keep it clean and do not try to cheat the system, you will see your rankings go up in no time