Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011, shortly before Google’s Panda update later that month. The description of upcoming changes and the prediction that SEO techniques will disappear reflect that moment.
The search engine Google wants to avoid spam pages at all costs, and these days Google considers any page that overdoes keyword density to be spam. While at first you needed to get the balance of those keywords right, Google will now give more weight to relevant, strictly original content.
Word has it that over time SEO techniques will disappear, since Google changes its algorithm without warning until it becomes impossible to decipher. Every SEO knows how much inbound links to your site, and their quality, matter, but few know that for a few months Google gave more weight to outbound links and their quality. A page’s PageRank was therefore based entirely on the opposite effect, which explains why pages with hardly any inbound links achieved a high PageRank.
Another change Google is making is to let users themselves determine how important a page is, so the new algorithm will analyse how users behave on your page. If you’ve managed to fool the search engine with keyword tricks or keyword stuffing and thousands of users have landed on your page, how long they stay there will be vital if you don’t want Google to push you down the search results.
Google will be watching more closely than ever a website’s bounce rate, and above all pages where the average time per visit is under a minute, because that shows thousands of users arrived drawn by terms that weren’t what they were looking for.
In short, the rules of the game are changing: the aim is for original content to rank better and, once you get the visits, for users to find what they’re looking for and feel comfortable browsing your page.
I admit that, like many bloggers, I’ve been the first to write absurd headlines at times just to squeeze in keywords and improve my rankings, because it was the only way to get ahead. So on the one hand I’m glad to know that might not be necessary from now on.
Featured image: Robbie Shade, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
