Business Management Consultant - Stuntdubl Search and Marketing Consulting

“All great truths are simple in final analysis, and easily understood; if they are not, they are not great truths.” - Napolean Hill

Don’t search for great truths with search engine updates! Analyzing updates is a necessary evil of practicing SEO, made increasingly painful if you try to wade through “update threads”. Staying on top of things is important, but even more important is maintaining your sanity (and thus power of observation). The simple fact is that like it or not Google’s engineers will probably always be much smarter than you or I on a macro-search scale. Google will continue to lead the pack with their mountains of P.H.d’s, and cause headaches for those SEO’s that take a reactive approach to updates and base their conclusions on small fragmented data sets.

They are going to continue to combat SEO tactics that manipulate the relevancy of their results. The methods used to combat the “hot button” issues will be create some colleteral damage. A big part of learning to not worry too much about analyzing the updates comes from trying to foresee what that damage will be to avoid it. By knowing that duplicate content is a key issue, you should work harder to avoid that. When the dust settles in a month or so, and some true logical conclusions come into play…we’ll know what to be avoiding for next time.

Google will be working on:
-Latent semantic indexing
-Duplicate content filtering
-Better and faster spidering
-Devaluing manipulated variables
-Migrating vertical search results

SEO tactics on the decline:
-Reciprocal links
-Keyword stuffing
-Link Networks
-Meta Information
-Internal anchor text stuffing

SEO tactics on the rise:
-Related phrases/ Semantic analysis
-Keyword co-occurence
-Unique IP links
- “Trusted” links
-Quality indicators
-Geo-targeting
-Behavioral targeting, more
-Personalization
-Trustrank
-Many of the other things in their patent paper
-More editorial control via eval.google.com
-User Tagging
-(oxymoron alert!) Community intelligence

What I try to spend the most time analyzing:
-Which purchased links I think still pass value
-Which sites have improved their “trust value”
-How I can find links from old trusted sites better
-What content are my users looking for
-How I can improve the indexability of my sites
-How I can improve the site architecture in the “eyes of the engines”
-What I would focus on if buying links becomes ineffective

Don’t get too used to “free” traffic, and if you like it…figure out how to keep it.