If you could have one question about SEO answered, what would it be?

Hey Chucky,

That's a great one! Here's my opinion...

We know that Google's core algo is built on the citation model, i.e. that links determine where content should be ranked. We therefore know that for Google to be effective at delivering users the best content, Google must be effective and efficient in discovering and calculating rankings based on in bound linking behaviour.

The better it is at finding links, the better quality its search engine results will be, because they will reflect user behaviour most accurately. (SEO can distort this in a few cases! But overwhelming results are actually organic.)

Now, you bring up an interesting observation about link wheeling, that often the Web 2.0 sites where the links are placed won't be indexed...

And so you ask, will the links be counted? Will the PR flow through the funnel?

Well, in my opinion, they would, assuming they've been crawled.

I say this because as I'm sure you know, (but I'll explain things clearly for newbies reading this) there is a difference between being indexed and being crawled.

Being crawled means that Google has visited your site, being indexed means that it has found a place to put your site somewhere in its results.

Now sometimes pages don't get indexed, or don't stay in the index. This doesn't just happen as a penalty, sometimes your web 2.0 properties just won't be indexed. In fact, 100% of the pages on a site almost never get indexed, particularly on sites with millions of pages like EZA and Squidoo. Terry Kyle talked about this in his 60 day backlinking thread.


Now, despite not getting indexed, these sites almost definitely get crawled. Why? Because the internal linking structure of these web 2.0 mega sites mean that almost all new content gets exposed to the Googlebot pretty soon.

So I guess the real question is,

Does Google deem a site that is not worth indexing, not worth counting the out bound links of?

And in that instance I would say no, it probably does count the links despite the link page not getting indexed. Even if a site isn't worth serving up for other people to read, it probably doesn't mean its 'vote' isn't factored into link popularity measurements.

Whether that link from an unindexed page loses weight because the page isn't indexed... there's another zinger

Anyway, ive found that enough backlinks will often push a web 2.0 property back into the index, and adding the link juice to the funnel never hurts!

Gavin

Nice one Brad... You raise some very important questions for our industry. Again, I'll add some context for the new recruits.


Personalized Search history

I believe personalized search history is something that Google has implemented in response to something that we as search marketers are often guilty of ignoring.

Searchers often make repeat visits to sites, and people don't bookmark stuff as much as they used to.

I'm always surprised to see a relatively large percentage of repeat visitors in client analytics data. Its often around 20%, which is not insignificant.

So what does this mean for us?

As we know all Google's technical expertise is utilized to deliver a better 'user experience'.

So from a user standpoint, a better search experience is delivered when sites that have been visited are, to some extent, favoured in the search listings so that they can be found again, for a second, third, fourth, viewing. Some people like digesting information in chunks.

Thinking about our own behaviour this makes sense. To get another look at something, we just turn to Google and type in the same or similar keyword, hoping to find the same sites that we were on a few days ago.

This would happen as part of a buyer decision process, and even an information seeking process.

Anyone who has worked as a salesman knows that some people just like making many 'information seeking' trips before they commit to purchase. Often asking for the same information. Evidently the same is, to some extent true on the web. In fact, thats why email list marketing typically yields significantly higher conversion rates than sending traffic directly to a landing page.

Even if the offer is perfect, a large percentage of people simply need more trust, familiarity and time to digest the information and feel comfortable about making a decision. Multiple exposures to the same content allow this.

The effect of this for us though, is that if a site is ranked high, and searchers visit it, it will get favoured by Google for that user by virtue of a characteristic that we can't compete with. The fact that the users already visited it!

So Brad is asking:

1) Will this kill standard SEO?

Brad you're right that it will impact 'old skool' SEO, though I don't think it will kill SEO as we know it. I know Google has been experimenting with personalized search for a while, but its also something Im sure they're very conscious of not OVER DOING. Stagnant results are no fun for anyone. If anything Google seem to be trending away from this in some respects with universal search and realtime search. The emphasis of the Caffeine update was obviously on breaking news and fast indexing also.

I think the way that we can best our competitors against personalized search is by taking advantage of universal search. We can release youtube videos, and press releases, and blog posts and take high rankings quickly, thus eliminating the advantage the personalized search skewed sites have. We can draw those visitors to our pages directly through Google owned mediums, and up our traffic and web presence at the same time.

Standard SEO will evolve to a point where fast, diverse content creation will be seen a component of traffic generation. It already is even. I think this will benefit all of us that are serious about marketing real businesses, but life is always going to get harder for adsense and affiliate marketers unless they really go after the low hanging fruit, make a bit of profit, then flip those sites while they're hot. Either that or build lists to control their own traffic sources.

Hyper Local SERPs

Again, not kill, but we'll need to do things a bit differently. Google Places is a big growth area, and it doesn't work the same way as the organic listings do. I think businesses can take advantage of Google places by encouraging their customers to leave feedback on their listing. This, in conjunction with actually being relevant and keeping an informative listing with lots of useful info will see businesses thriving off their listings.

Couple this with a standard SEO campaign, and you can get a Google places listing, a double organic listing with indentation, and a directory listing on one page, and even some adwords and a youtube video. Talk about exposure! And for us as SEO consultants, talk about additional services! $$$

I highly doubt geo targeting of organic listings will get too hyperlocalised, simply because top level domains can obviously only indicate countries, and hosting locations based on IPs will not properly deliver relevant businesses due to data centres being all over the country / world.

Is SEM the way of the Future?

I think you're right that if SEO looks to be a bit more effort, people might start seeing paid traffic as a supplement, though I doubt a replacement.

As for SEM being the way of the future, if you mean PPC I'd have to say probably not. I think PPC will become far too competitive when big business really jumps in and sends CPCs through the roof. We chase 100% profit margins minimum, they are often happy with 10% and usually a few years making a loss, lol. The CTRs off adwords are still too low, especially now that those sponsored links are competing against images and videos. They are far less compelling for clicks even if you have the money it will be hard to really scale up the traffic.

I think paid advertising is great, and CURRENTLY PPC can still be very effective for its speed and conversion tracking benefits, particularly if people take the time get nice high quality score so they can get cheap clicks with compelling ads. It can even be used to supplement SEO long term. Still, its price is at market and it will only go up, so if anything, I think SEO will probably be the future, though as we've discussed, it might involve more diverse content creation than it used to.

Gavin