Changes in Google's SEO

For me biggest change this year is much deeper use of semantic indexing. Google recognizes and ranks equivalent words or semantically related keywords really well last time. Scope is different depending on language and keywords though.

 

Maybe this is a stupid question, but how does Google evaluate content?

 

That's exactly what I was wondering

I know on Google Webmaster Tools, it shows your most common keywords, etc. --- so Google obviously has some sort of word counter, etc.

 

I guess that's the real thing about Google. If Yahoo! knew this then they would have outranked Google.

 

Are you saying that all yahoo need to do is find this one secret and then they will outrank google??

Even if google bought yahoo and swapped the yahoo results with google search results, I think more people would still use google because of how it looks and being used to it.

 

i think without backlinks the targetting traffic is not possible.

 

Presently Google doesn't prefer backlinks...so built a quality content to your site...as most of the sites have been closed link exchange as well...

 

google gives preference for quality information which useful to users

 

As for me, one of the most serious changes - Google reduced strength of link directories. In past years we were able to promote sites just with directory submission, nowadays most of strength directories lost there PR even up to zero from PR5!

 

Another factor that nobody seems to consider is linking TO other websites. I've been doing some experimenting with a few websites over the past 9 months. I found that if you link to 3 or 4 related websites (I know that's not easy to do!) that have high PR it makes your PR higher.
I added nofollow to contact us, about us, etc... and any website that I link to will get a nofollow if they lack PR (2 or less).
Does it help the SERPS? Yes

 

It seems also having relevant anchor text helps you rank higher for a keyword

 

According to my observation here are the important things:

- Content is king
- Backlinks are queen
- With universal search, Google is giving importance to other forms of content like pictures, videos etc.
- Linking out to related high authority site certainly helps
- Importance of social bookmarking and user generated content is increasing

 

However content is only king if you have backlinks.

Just to prove my point, I have a diet website with 100% unique scientific content that works. However I don't get much traffic at all because I have only built a few backlinks to it.