Why I Try to Spend Less Time Analyzing Algorithm Updates
Online marketing information can change quickly This article is 18 years and 137 days old, and the facts and opinions contained in it may be out of date.
“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
-Better and faster spidering
-Migrating vertical search results
SEO tactics on the decline:
-Keyword stuffing
-Meta Information
SEO tactics on the rise:
-Related phrases/ Semantic analysis
-Keyword co-occurence
– “Trusted” links
-Quality indicators
-Behavioral targeting, more
-Personalization
-Many of the other things in their patent paper
-More editorial control via eval.google.com
-(oxymoron alert!) Community intelligence
What I try to spend the most time analyzing:
-Which sites have improved their “trust value”
-What content are my users looking for
-How I can improve the site architecture in the “eyes of the engines”
Don’t get too used to “free” traffic, and if you like it…figure out how to keep it.
Todd, You read Napoleon Hill? I thought you were a smart, savvy guy before, but now I know that for a fact.