The reason for writing this article is that I recently read another article from SitePro news which had some interesting ideas about the future evolution of Google. Everyone in the SEO idustry should by now be well versed in the story of Google's latest "Jagger" update. As with previous Google updates it has taken its share of victims as the algorithm seeks to further remove spam and seo efforts. This time it's main focus has been on the structure of links. Those who have enjoyed the benefits of link swapping in order to increase their popularity suddenly found themselves stripped of rank. Each Google update seems to further remove SEO techniques leaving the optimizer with fewer alternative methods. The optimizers that will survive in the future will be those that learn to change and adapt quickly to new forms of site promotion. The most interesting point in the SitePro news article was with reference to Google Analytics. This used to be a paid service offered by Google which is their traffic analyzer. They are now offering it freely to webmasters. The SitePro news article suggested that if everyone signed up to this service then Google would have access to a wealth of web site data. It would then use the information from analytics to form part of it's ranking algorithm based on site visitors. If this were the case then it would completely turn site rankings on it's head. If a website was rubbish and no one visited it then Google would consider it a low priority. If a site was visited by vast numbers then this would be placed on a pedestal as being a highly relevant and popular site. It is an interesting theory and one that yet has to be proven. Google already recieve site information with their sitemaps service and although they say it does not influence a site's ranking how can we be sure. Incidently I tried using the new Google analytics service and have been put into a waiting line due to popular demand. It seems that if Google does indeed plan on using the analytic results for its algorithm then it will not be short of websites providing the data. |
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