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Yesterday I noticed an interesting post from Shoemoney about the future of SEO. He got interviewed about this subject and one of the questions he got asked about was what he thought about the future of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Shoemoney is pretty clear about this question, he thinks SEO has no future. SEO will die because of the voting on toolbars, analytics reports, geo statistics, social bookmarking etc. which is affecting the rankings more and more these days.

My point of view is a little bit different though. There will always be room for SEO, it will not die completely! I agree with shoemoney that other factors are becoming more and more important, but I cannot agree on this line: “So in my opinion there just is no future in current SEO for Google anyway.” It is good that he mentions “in my opinion” because I think there will be always room for good proper SEO and it is all about relevant links. But who am I?

Anyway, if you think SEO will not helping anything anymore in the future, please stop optimize your pages so my pages will have a better change on ranking higher

Popularity: 14% [?]

Webmasters in a discussion forum have noticed changes in Google’s search results. Do we have to expect a larger ranking algorithm update? How will this influence the ranking of your web pages in Google’s search results?

What changes did webmasters notice in Google’s search results?

Not all webmasters noticed the same changes. Here’s an overview of what has been reported:

* Some established websites that did not spam dropped out of Google’s index early March.
* It seems to take much longer now until new websites get indexed by Google.
* Rather less relevant results have received higher rankings because some relevant pages either dropped out of the index or lost some of their inbound links.
* The Cache data doesn’t seem to be updated.
* The site: and inurl: queries on Google that normally fluctuate for large websites now report the same numbers every day.

Changes like these are usually a clear indicator of an upcoming ranking algorithm update.

Is this really a ranking algorithm update?

Google engineer Matt Cutts denied that there are any major changes in the search results and that there was a ranking algorithm update on the way.

However, he wanted to investigate if and why the results change so much.

The observations of the webmasters in the forum might be normal changes that happen all the time. But the webmasters who discovered the changes are very web-savvy and they should be able to distinguish an anomaly from usual fluctuations.

What does this mean to your Google rankings?

It has yet to turn out whether this really is a ranking algorithm or not. If your rankings haven’t changed yet, there’s no need to act. The whole thing might just be a temporary hiccup.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Google releases a robots.txt generator

Google’s generator is designed to give you an easy and interactive way to build a robots.txt file. It can be as simple as entering the files and directories you don’t want crawled by any robots.

Google uses massive amounts of data to combat fraud

Fraudsters know that clicking on a certain ad will create anomalies in the data that will trigger further investigation of their IP addresses, methods, or the targeting of a particular advertiser’s ads. So they try to ‘even out’ the anomalies by creating more impressions to balance out the clicks, and other attempts to make the fraud seem more ‘real.’ But all this does is dig them in deeper, creating other anomalies.

Will you be sued over your ad copy usage?

There are ads running on Google right now using the exact trademarked term. In fact, a substantial number of ads use various trademarked terms. From the people I talk to, the vast majority of them rely on Google to tell them which words they should not use. This case could set a dangerous precedent of advertiser suing advertiser and ignoring Google’s trademark complaint process.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Are you sure that your website visitors understand the text on your web pages? If your web pages are difficult to understand, you might not earn as much as you could with your website.

The readability of your web pages influences your sales

Many websites use technical language that is very difficult to understand for the average web surfer. In addition, some webmasters like long and complicated sentences. Long and complicated sentences are not a sign of professionalism. They just show that the author of the sentences doesn’t care about the readers.

The more complicated the text on your web pages, the more likely it is that a web surfer leaves your website. Web surfers are impatient people. If they have to labor to understand your web pages, web surfers will go away to find an easier site than yours.

How to check the readability of your web pages

There is an official standard that you can use to specify the readability of your web pages. The Flesch Reading Ease test is a United States governmental standard to determine how easy a text is to read. It measures the approximate level of education necessary to understand the web page content. Higher scores indicate that the text is easier to read, and lower numbers mark harder-to-read texts.

Make sure that your web pages are easy to understand. Do not require too much work from your website visitors. Make it easy to understand your web pages, make it easy to navigate them, make it easy to buy on your website. The easier your website is to use, the more you will sell.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Yesterday we discussed the first 2 points of why your website may look like spam to search engines! Today we are discussing the two other points.

3. Link factors that can indicate a spammy website:

Spammy websites often have many links to other spam and low quality websites. Low quality websites aren’t likely to have links from trusted sites.

4. Technical factors that can indicate a spammy website:

Spammy website often use redirects (JavaScript, MetaRefresh, etc.) from landing pages. Spammy websites also often use cloaking. Of course, other spam elements such as hidden text also cause problems with search engines.

If your website uses many of the elements mentioned above then it could be classified as spam. In that case, you should consider a redesign of your website.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Is your website nowhere to be seen in Google? It might be that Google doesn’t like your website because it looks like spam. Check the following points to find out whether your website might look like spam or not.

1. Domain name factors that can indicate a spammy website:

The domain names of spammy websites are often very long and contain many hyphens. Those domain names often contain commercial high value keywords (the keywords for which you receive lots of spam messages that we don’t want to mention here).

Spammy domains are often registered by people who own a very large number of domains. The more domains a person owns, the more likely it is that the quality of a single domain isn’t high. Spammy domains are often very young and have a short registration period. Low quality domains also often use .info, .cc, .us and other cheap top level domains. Spammy websites often have many keyword-stuffed sub domains.

2. Content factors that can indicate a spammy website:

Spammy websites often show very many ads. They also often contain high-commercial keywords. The keyword density and the keyword frequency on low quality websites is often very high. Spammy websites often have duplicate content and content scraped from other websites. Low quality websites usually don’t have unique content.

Low quality websites usually don’t contain a privacy policy, a copyright notice page and “Contact us” page with a full address.

Click here for part 2 to check out factor 3 and 4.

Popularity: 3% [?]