6 new SEO terms based on recent developments (Web 3.0)

[orvn]

Sooooo, I wrote this article in my brand new blog and wanted to share it here, as
(a) It's rather relevant
(b) I want your opinion (criticism encouraged)
(c) I wanted the backlink and attention from WF

The links I reference for further reading and a [slightly] more detailed article can be found here. Also there are pretty pictures.

Six New SEO Terms You Must Know As the Semantic Web Draws Closer

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A cornucopia of recent changes all over the web (Google included) are directed at making the internet a more Web 3.0 (semantic) friendly place cluttered with less SPAM. Let’s take a look at some of the terms you’re going to be hearing a lot more often.

1. Content Farms
We’ve all heard of link farming, where a site contains massive quantities of links, usually cross-linked with other sites in a large and complex link network. Much in the same way Google began penalizing link farms over five years ago, it is now targeting content farms.

We’ve all seen them, websites that house thousands upon thousands or articles that have been written for a couple of bucks a pop and contain absolutely useless and poorly written information. They’re typically flooded with links and SEO’d to the max, so a lot of worthless information sits atop SERP’s.

Last week (fourth week of February 2011), Google made some algorithm changes that had a dramatic impact on people’s search results. Suddenly those three dollar, five-hundred word articles hastily written by some guy in India aren’t worth as much.

2. LDA (latent dirichlet allocation)
LDA is an algorithmic methodology search engines use to determine whether or not different words and word combinations are relevant to one another. It does so by clustering keywords/topics into relevant groups, based on the way they appear in powerful authority pages on the topic.

SEOmoz has a marvelous post explaining LDA in honour of their new LDA assessment tool.

3. 503 Error: Service Unavailable
You probably know of a few error codes, like the ubiquitous 404 and popular-to-SEOers 301 redirect. But the 503 is probably a new one.

At a glance, the 503 allows you to tell bots that your page is temporarily down or not functioning properly. You don’t want the Googlebot visiting your site and thinking that it no longer works when it’s only down for maintenance, do you?

Google’s Webmaster Blog has a post about properly implementing 503‘s.

4. Micro Formats
In introducing Micro Formats, Google made a huge stride in the direction of a semantic web. It’s sort of like having various META tags for a specific piece of content known as an entity.

For instance, if you had a contact page with your contact information, you could let Google know what each piece of content (your address, longitude and latitude, email, phone, fax etc.) is using HTML attributes (Google calls this an “hcard”, rather than the typical “vcard”).

My explanation really does not do justice here, but the Google Webmaster guide on micro formats certainly does!

5. Rich Snippets
One of the things Google is already using microdata from microformats for is the creation of richsnippets in SERPs.

At a glace, rich snippets mean more information in your search result snippet, beyond the usual META description. Learn how to take advantage of rich snippets here.

6. Deep Link Ratio
Deep links are backlinks to pages other than the site’s home page, i.e.- pages deep within the site.

A deep link ratio is the ratio of the number of deep links to a site vs. the number of home page links, expressed as a percentage.

SEO practitioners often build links mostly to the landing or index page of a site, this creates a low deep link ratio and is a sure-fire sign of unnatural link building. Blogs and news sites therefore have very high deep link ratios. As a general rule a deep link ratio of over 50% is a good idea for a site to maintain to avert Google’s suspicion of unnatural link building.

However this can vary from industry to industry; for instance, a classifieds site like Craigslist would have a very low expected deep link ratio, as it’s deep pages represent temporary ads which are constantly being removed