May Insights from Backcountry SEO Guru

Good stuff in the latest from Jimmy Mac, our SEO Guru.


Quote:
Chasing a Search Algorithm is Getting More Difficult

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

This expression is coming back into play for the SEO arena. In another effort to stay one step ahead of the link spammers, Google is rumored to be gearing up for yet another shift in calculating rank among the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

Turning to Click Behavior

Word on the street is that click behavior and page content will supplant inbound links in order of importance when determining page relevance. There will still be a reliance on back links, but the weight given to this metric will be declining and that of click behavior increasing. I wouldn't be surprised if searchers were being tested on this already.

Improved Snippets

Google also recently invested in an up-and-coming technology from an Israeli doctoral student named Ori Alon. Ori recently developed an advanced text search algorithm to better categorize related content across the web for use on his search engine. This will help Google build better, more relevant snippets on their SERP's: even more evidence of improving the click-through to relevant content.

One More Round

In my opinion this is all being done to take a step away from the flaws in the back link analysis Google and others rely so heavily on. Does this mean you should stop building links? No, that would be silly. Think of this as just another round in the game. Once spammers and black hats figure out ways to beat this system, there will be something new introduced. The game just keeps on playing.

How can I keep up?

If you don't have the time, stomach, or resources to participate in the black hat games, stick to adding value and creating something remarkable that people want. If you chance the algorithm, you could win and get ranked, but you could also lose and drop from all search engines.

Recommended Reading

Barry Schwartz -Google's New Popularity Rank; Traffic Versus Links

RustyBrick - http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003631.html

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