Google is doing a brilliant job of pushing people away from planned SEO behavior and toward a more planned approach.
Here's a look at the major developments, some of Google's initiatives driving this change, and the overall impact these changes will have on SEO.
1. '(Not Provided)'
Google made the move to make all organic searches secure early September 23. This means we've lost the capability to get keyword data for users arriving to our websites from Google search.
Losing Google keyword data is sad for a number of reasons. These impacts publishers in many ways, including losing a valuable tool for understanding what the intent of customers that come to their site, for change optimization, and much more.
For planned SEO efforts, it just means that keywords data is harder to come by. There are ways to work around this, for now, but it just won't be quite as simple as it used to be.
2. No Page Rank Update Since February
Google has updated the PageRank numbers shown in the Google Toolbar every 3 months ago or so, but those numbers haven't been updated while February. This means 8 months have gone by, or two updates have been skipped.
In addition, Google's famous Engineer Matt Cutts has said Toolbar PageRank won't be updated again this year, most important many to speculate that PageRank is going away. I won't miss it because I don't look at PageRank often and I normally don't have a Google toolbar in my browser.
3. Hummingbird
There are a small number of elements to Google's Hummingbird algorithm, announced in time for Google's official birthday, but like Caffeine before it, this is really a major platform transform. Google has built a capability to understand conversational search queries much better than before.
For example, submit a query to Google such as "show me pictures of Fenway Park", and it does:
Then you can chase that query with this one: "who plays there", and you get this result:
Both of these show conversational search at work .Hummingbird really changes the keyword game rather a bit. Over time, exact keyword matches will no longer be such a big deal.
4. Google+
While it seemed to get off to a slow start at first, many argue that it has developed a lot of momentum, and is growing quickly. The data on Google+'s market share is pretty hard to parse, but there are some clear impacts on search, such as the display of modified results:
In addition, you can also see posts from people on Google+ show up in the results too. This is true even if you do your search in "incognito" mode:
And, while I firmly consider that a link in a Google+ share isn't treated like a regular web link, it seems likely to me that it does have some SEO value when joint with other factors.
How Google+ fits into this picture is that it was built from the ground up to be a content sharing network that helps with establishing "identities" and "semantic relevance". It does this quite well, and in spite of what you might read in some places, there is a ton of action in all kinds of different verticals on Google+.
5. Authorship
OK, authorship also isn't new but it is a part of a bigger picture. Google can use this to connect new pieces of content with the person who wrote it.
Over time, this data can be potentially used to measure which authors write substance that draw a very strong response (links, social shares, +1s, comments) and give them a higher "Author Rank".
We won't look into into the specifics of how Author Rank might work now, but you can read "Want to Rank in Google? Build Your Author Rank Now" for my thoughts on ways they could look at that.
That said, in the future you can imagine that Google could use this as a ranking signal for queries where more complete articles are likely to be a good response. Bottom line: your personal authority matters.
I also should mention Publisher Rank, the concept of building a site's authority, which is perhaps more important. Getting this payoff depends on a holistic approach to building your authority.
The Google announcement included a statement that "up to 10% of users' daily information needs engage learning about a broad topic." That is a pretty big number, and I think over time that this characteristic will become a pretty big deal. Effectively, this is an entirely new type of way to rank in the SERPs.
This increases the payoff from Author Rank and Publisher Rank – there is a lot to be gained by developing both of these, assuming that Google actually does make it a ranking factor at some point. Note that I wrote some thoughts on how the role of in-depth articles could evolve.
The focus now is on accepting your target users, producing great content, establishing your authority and visibility, and given that a great experience for the users of your site. Properly architecting your site so that the search engines can understand it, including using schema and related markup, addressing local search , and work of this type still matters, too.
But, the obsession with tactical items like PageRank and keywords is going to weaken away. As Google tweaks the way their service operates, and look for ways to capture new signals, they do things that of course push you in that direction. It isn't going to stop. Expect more of the same going forward.
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