Guest contributor Bryant Jaquez looks into the future of Google’s search algorithm.
Despite Matt Cutts’ best efforts, the SEO world is full of an unnatural obsession with The Algorithm.
Who can blame us though? Our livelihoods, and the livelihoods of our clients, depend on our ability to understand this demi-mythical robot.
Now, before we begin, let me do the usual disclaimer: I do not work for Google; I am not personal friends with Matt Cutts; and this is just a hypothesis. But if you will track with me through this article, I will teach you how to think like a bit more like Google. You will learn what Google’s engineers have been talking about, and you will learn how to stay a few steps ahead of their “next big move.”
Tip 1: Focus on the player, not the game
Google is a business. They have real business goals. They have investors. And they have quarterly goals (just like you ).
Believe it or not, they do not release updates just to make the entire search-marketing community angry. (Although, I am sure their engineers take some pleasure in that.) They release updates to improve their search results, because that is the only way they can increase their revenue.
Instead of looking at the updates from the perspective of what they “penalized,” look at them from the perspective of what they rewarded.
Now we are getting somewhere. Try to look at the websites that benefit from the updates, and you will gain far more insight into the mind of Google than if you focus on the penalties.
Aside from competitive rank-tracking, the easiest way to find the sites that benefited is to look at the big complainers and see what websites replaced them in SERPs.
Tip 2: Do more listening
Google understandably demonstrates a high level of secrecy around their updates. Personally, I cannot blame them. But if you know where to look, you can learn a lot about what they are doing.
Listen to Google’s employees and what they are talking about.
For example, long before Panda stomped around the internet, Matt Cutts devoted a lot of time talking about low-quality content, content farms, and duplicate content. There were even videos made about the subject as far back as 2007. (Here is a video of Matt’s talking about thin content.)
Googlers will usually talk about things they are working on. Find people who work directly with Google’s search algorithm, and follow their social profiles. (Here is a list of Googlers on Google+.)
Tip 3: My predictions for the next big update
Here are my predictions on some of the things Google is going to address in the near future. I do not know if they are going to be the publicly named updates, but I think web masters will benefit from focusing on them. That’s the thing about algorithm updates: they address things you should have been doing already.
Google will reward secure sites
Matt Cutts has recently been spending a lot of energy talking about hacking attempts and how to protect your email accounts and websites. This tells me that Google is focusing on hacking.
I believe they are going to reward sites that are secure, and perhaps punish sites that are less secure, because sites that are infected and insecure pose a threat to Google’s reputation. This already shows up in search results (in Chrome) but I believe it will also affect rankings.
To benefit from this, make sure your site is malware-free, and keep it secure. (If you are a non-technical site owner, you can find many good plug-ins for your CMS.)
Google will reward sites with structured data
This could be a blog post in itself, so I will be brief. Structured data is good for users, and it is good for search engines.
Matt Cutts told a group of web developers (here is the video) to read up on standardized web forms. He said that standard forms allow web browsers to auto-complete the form, and he also mentioned that usability features like this make users happy.
I think sites that use standardized data will be rewarded with higher rankings (at the very least, this will be implemented by a second-tier effect because they will have higher click-through rates). Get to work studying how to structure your data at Schema.org.
Google will devalue automated “exact-match anchor text links” like infographics
Googlers have talked a lot about devaluing inforgraphic links.
Now, let’s be realistic. There is not going to be an all-or-nothing solution for this kind of signal. Google cannot devalue every infographic link because that would break the internet. What are they going to do, devalue any link from a webpage that has the word “infographic” or “infograph” on it?
More likely, they will devalue automated exact-match anchor text strategies. This will include badges, press releases (watch out newspapers), and infographics.
To avoid a penalty, make sure your automated link strategies use your brand name and not a keyword phrase. You can also point the link to your home page, which is as white-hat as you can get. This will still help you build links to your site and improve your authority, but you will be safe from having too many exact-match keyword links floating around the internet.
Google will reward sites that are optimized for mobile
Google has been focusing on mobile for years now, but I think this will sooner or later have a direct effect on rankings. They simply cannot stop talking about mobile. Last year, Google released updates to their UI that only affected tablets (e.g. view results from the past hour and day).
If they are not already, I think they will allow mobile optimization to affect your ranking ability, especially when a searcher is performing the search on a mobile device. So get optimizing.
Either make your sites responsive, or dictate a separate style sheet for mobile browsers. There are billions of people who search the web from mobile devices,so why would Google continue to send them to sites that they cannot even navigate from a smartphone? Think about it.
Google will continue to agonize over usability
Page load times, navigation, information architecture, having a content focus on every page, not stuffing your site with ads, etc. Keep focusing on this, because Google will continue to focus on it.
Make your site amazing, easy-to-use, and easy-to-find, and you will be rewarded.
