SEO Blog

“We don’t actually want you to be successful”, said Google CEO Eric Schmidt to a gathering of publishing executives meeting on Google’s campus earlier this week. According to the publishing industry magazine Advertising Age, Schmidt continued saying, “The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance.” Google has gotten tired of being gamed. A line from the AdAge article reads, “The company’s algorithms are trying to find the most relevant search results, after all, not the sites that best game the system”.

Because Google is the primary source of information for the vast majority of Internet users, it is the search engine most important to the online marketing industry. Even when Internet users are not using Google specifically, they frequently see advertisements from Google’s AdWords system applied to the document they are reading. Those ads are contextually delivered based on their relevancy to the content on the documents they appear on. Serving an estimated 75%+ of the information market and constantly introducing innovative ways to bring information and advertising to consumers, Google is IT.

Naturally, over the past ten years of Google’s existence, a group of dedicated and studious technicians have learned how to design pages to best meet the standards set by Google. Known as search engine optimization specialists or SEOs, this group of techies spend most of their working lives figuring out which factors have which weight on Google. That group has, for the most part, worked diligently and honestly to present the information of their clients (or in many cases, themselves) to consumers via keyword driven search query results. You type “South Beach Hotel” and up comes a hotel in Miami who pays us to make that happen regularly.

How we make such things happen suddenly seems less important to Google than the fact that we exist to make such things happen. A remarkable shift in Google’s traditionally collaborative view of SEOs is taking place. SEOs should immediately take heed of it as that shift will change the way we approach the work we do.

Over the past six or seven years, Google has been highly communicative with the search marketing sector. The company even allowed top engineers like Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox and Adam Lasnik to engage the search marketing sector in order to share information and work to guide the sector towards practices that best met Google’s needs. For the most part, the search marketing community has responded favourably by conforming our standards to those suggested by Google with the implicit threat that if we failed to, our sites or those of our clients might be diminished in or outright banned from search results compiled by Google.

Perhaps the SEO sector has become too good at what it does. Like most talented search marketing shops, Metamend is able to achieve top organic placements for our clients with the relative ease that comes from hard, hands-on work. Our SEO staff knows exactly what they have to do based on a powerful set of analytic tools and years of personal experience. Though our techniques are modeled on industry best practices (which are often defined by Google’s guidelines) and never veer from following those best practices, our success and that of others like us puts Google in an awkward position as it moves towards personalized and localized result sets.

Perhaps Google’s own success is also a factor. Building a search engine is a very difficult thing to do. Maintaining and improving it is even harder. The move towards personalized and localized results is a testimony to Google’s success in using the behaviours of its users to compile unique result sets that meet their individual needs. A number of the current methods and techniques used by more basic SEO shops make it more difficult for Google to create and present those results with accuracy, hence the sudden change in the company’s attitude.

In the past few weeks, Google has rewritten the rules on URL mod-rewrites, altered the value of anchor-text, changed how it perceives and deals with duplications of content, introduced new factors to the quality-scores assigned to paid-ads (and the landing pages they lead to), and devalued the weight of links from directories and competing search devices whose names don’t begin with the letter “G”.

Each of these moves is logical considering the direction Google appears to be moving in but each is also a step away from the type of web page optimization Google previously fostered. So many steps in such quick succession and it appears Google is virtually running the other direction. Here’s why…

Google is no longer producing search results for the general public. They are now producing search results for individual members of the general public. Many of the traditional techniques used by search engine optimization specialists (except those aimed at improving content and making web sites easier for spiders to read) make it more difficult for Google’s personalized algorithms to determine which document is most relevant to which user. Each of the changes to Google’s algorithm mentioned two paragraphs ago was made in order to allow Google to easier personalize result sets based on a user’s unique location, interests and behaviours.

In order to deal with the changes at Google, search engine optimization specialists will need to change the focus of their practices. It is going to be a difficult transition requiring a great deal of experimentation and inter-agency communication in order to ensure the sector does not foul itself trying to affect the Google placements of their clients.

Here are four factors I know Google is interested in rewarding. Please note, this is not even remotely a conclusive list. These changes are happening live-time and there is a lot more to learn about Google’s intentions and expectations. I’m not even certain Google would be able to produce a conclusive list at this point as there are so many (hundreds perhaps thousands) of unique factors that play into Google’s complex ranking algorithms.

1/ Relevancy of page content and theme
Page or document content is by far the most important ranking factor at Google. Fortunately for the SEO community and Metamend in particular, content is something we do very, very well. Tightening up website content to ensure that each page represents a specific topic (and only that topic) is one of the best things SEOs can do right now for the sites under their control.

Google is in the business of producing what it considers to be the most relevant results sets based on an individual user’s search query. They are getting far better at it than ever before and are light-years ahead of anyone else in determining factors unique to each of its users. There are ways to manage and improve content on web documents that make those documents appear more relevant to users based on location. Given the vast improvements in Google’s ability to spider through simple forms and understand/parse through dynamically generated content, there are actually more Google friendly methods today than there were six months ago to use on-page content to achieve strong localized (and personalized) placements.

2/ Offering Google means of tracking user experience
I have spent a lot of time wondering about the mod-rewrite recommendations Google made three weeks ago. They recommended that we stop doing it. A mod-rewrite is a module that automatically rewrites dynamic URLs to make them appear as text-based URLs. Google has become very good at extracting information from a dynamic URL string and highly values that information. It also notes that many newer webmasters make errors when rewriting URLs or use rewritten URLs as a means of keyword stuffing. Good SEOs use the rewrite to present URLs the users can understand. A search user is more likely to click on a URL that reads, “www.XYZ.com/product/rain-resistant-urban-wear.php” than a URL that reads, “www.XYZ.com/product/id=?00084457prod=?bebop-10″.

Which do you think you would click on? Even if they go to the exact same page, the first is far more descriptive and more likely to draw a positive response from a search user. Since SEOs are marketers as well as being technicians, it is highly unlikely we would give up using mod-rewrites unless Google absolutely forced us to.

Since we know that Google loves to follow users as they follow links from document to document in a website, the insertion of breadcrumb navigation links designed to lead to users making localized choices might be a good way to give Google much of the information they want about that user while still rewriting URLs to make them more user-friendly.

3/ Help other businesses help you
This one might seem a bit counter-intuitive but it is a smart strategy for getting good love from Google. Google continues to see incoming links as valuable indicators that others appreciate the content on any given document. Getting those links, especially ones that will help Google determine relevancy to specific users (based on location and shared interest) is getting more difficult. Because Google is ratcheting up its analysis on content-quality and applying that analysis against the weight of links found on a page, the smart way to get good links is to provide others with good content. In other words, you “pay” for the link by creating something of value for those you want to get a link from.

4/ Learn to love LSI
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It’s actually a rather easy concept that most school children can grasp but a very complex topic when dealing with page content. To boil it down, Google has gotten smart enough to be able to connect words that are synonyms. Since “relevancy” is determined by topic, Google’s ability to determine words that are synonymous with others becomes a very strong tool for practical SEOs. This is especially interesting when dealing with links between documents found on different domains.

Bottom Line
Google has made massive changes in the way it looks at documents in its index. We as search marketers are thus making changes in the ways we treat those documents. There are other important alterations in the methods and means SEOs will employ in the near to mid future. Many of those changes have already been implemented at Metamend in anticipation of Google’s shift. Others we are working on as we learn more about Google’s intentions. Ultimately, the search marketing agencies willing to adapt and deliver will thrive as will their clients. The time for most SEM shops to start re-adapting is right about now.