Why Yorkshire?
Why do I name this update "Yorkshire"? Well, why not? :)
Seriously, it's where I live, so "Yorkshire" is just a little tongue in cheek. But here it also serves as a metaphor for a point I'm trying to emphasise – and that is that people should realise that the New Google that is shaping up is not the same as the Old Google we're used to.
That may sound obvious, but a lot of SEO that I've seen is still stuck in treating New Google as Old Google. That's asking for failure. New Google is effectively going to be equivalent to a new form of Search Engine. It demands closer and more considered attention.
People in SEO communities are still talking about Content SEO and getting backlinks. The warning about "Yorkshire" is that a lot of this will become irrelevant - unless an expert system is specifically catered for.
Maybe some SEO's can batter Google through sheer force of linkage, but for the majority of webmasters who enter SEO communities looking for advice on getting their rankings back, they need to be told that New Google needs to be dealt with differently.
In the olden days there were no hurricanes - there were dances. These were, generally, smooth and musical affairs, moving to a distinct rhythm - once a month you saw the SERPs update, and could therefore evaluate your SEO efforts.
Google changed the dancing tune last April. Or, more to the point, Google stopped the music - and when it finally restarted, Google was dancing on the rolling updates.
Florida wasn't a hurricane – it was a quake, and one that will rumble on, crashing through until it affects the entire range of keywords. Austin was merely one of the shocks – there will be more yet as more keywords fall under and expert set.
Some SEOs seem to still see the monthly updates of PR and backlinks as the important machinery of Google, but these are merely Public Relations offerings - Google already has PR and backlinks calculated and incorporates this information in the rolling updates. There is no longer any monthly dance, but too often people still regard the monthly public updates as something more relevant than they actually are.
Lower PR and self-SEO webmasters absolutely have to recognise that PR is not the ranking model to be followed in an expert system. It can be a guide to link popularity - and that's great if that's what your measuring - but such webmasters need to be entirely warned that PageRank is not the first port of concern in an expert ranking system. Forget PR - forget quantity over quality.
The entire SEO world is changing face this year – in 2004 Yahoo will almost certainly use technology it has purchased under the companies of Inktomi and AllTheWeb to set itself apart. And MSN is believed about to bring out its own new search engine technology.
But even this loss won't drag Google down too far – even if Google suddenly stopped supplying results to third-parties, it would still command around 50% of the search traffic. And, of course, this is New Google, that by the time of the IPO (let alone end of the year) will almost certainly have covered its keyword set with an expert system.
When the search engines change, then SEO has to change, and adapt to survive. Some thought they had it bad with Florida, and Austin. But Yorkshire is coming.
And that is what the webmaster world needs to be prepared for.
Next >> Optimising for expert systems?
