New Age Google?
As it’s now 2012 The System has decided to have a look at end of the world theories!
No not Nostradamus quatrains, planetary alignments, invisible asteroids, raptures or Mayan calenders; but if 2011 was anything to go by 2012 will sound the death knell for many websites that rely upon SEO and organic search engine rankings.
Rather than make any off the wall predications as to what is going to happen to search, it makes sense to look at what happened in 2011 and the likely outcomes of those changes.
So what has been going on in 2011?
Well 90% of webmasters questioned would probably say the Google Panda update was the most significant change to search in 2011. Admittedly this probably had the biggest impact on Google SERPS however I’d argue that something much more significant for the long term took place last year and that was the integration of the Yahoo and Bing.
Prior to the merger some strange things were happening!
At the beginning of the year Google accused Bing of Copying its search results.
Personally I’d noticed for a couple of years that if Google slapped a sites rankings by say its classic -50 penalty, the same effect would be seen on Bing within days. It is well known that Bing ‘used to’ refresh its index a lot more regularly than Google, however this has changed since Panda. The evidence provided leads on to conclude that Bing had been consistently ‘scaping’ the Google results, reverse engineering the algorithm and including the output in regular Bing refreshes.
Throughout the year Bing has consistently been gaining ground on search traffic at Googles expense mainly due to its preferred mobile phone operating system with integrated Bing results.
Although it is difficult to prove conclusively there is strong evidence that the FebruaryPanda update misfired in actual quality of SERPs produced. Maybe they had to release the Panda update earlier than planned due to the pressure they were coming under from Bing? Panda is considered by many to be an ongoing process with regular monthly updates which suggests that the quality analysis is not stable. IMHO Panda is the biggest exercise in live software testing that has ever been undertook! So expect more!
Thoughout the year and before the announcement of the Search merger, Yahoo was rationalising and removing services. One of the biggest losses to the SEO community was the removal of the Site Explorer tool. No longer can anyone see why their competitions site ranks – for free.
Bing/Yahoo results now virtually mirror Googles and when Google shakes so does Bing!
It appears we finally have a meta-algorithm of search acceptable by 99% of the search providers!
So what else is Google up to?
In the next post I’ll look at what appears to be a massive application of penalties for all sorts of illegal linking, skewed search results, Google punishing itself for blog backlinks and what is white hat in 2012?
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