There is a great posting in Marketing Profs by Aaron Dun entitled, “The New Google Search: Six Changes That Rocked the SEO World” (http://www.mpdailyfix.com/the-new-google-search-six-changes-that-rocked-the-seo-world/?adref=nlt060912&utm_source=mptw&utm_medium=myview&utm_campaign=basic&utm_term=sales&utm_content=post) that talks to the evolution of SEO over the past decade and how Google’s successive changes continue to change the landscape of search, insofar as the strategies that companies need to employ in order to best support ranking.

Mr. Dun goes on to discuss each of the six changes and the affect they have had as follows (in chronologic order):

-Google Panda – In this change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm the idea was  to shutdown “content farms” (sites that exist solely to rank highly in search results, grab traffic, and monetize that traffic with paid ads for actual content sites). The end result was that quality sites ranked higher in search than so-called “content farms”.

-Google+ - Google+ was created as a social networking service, in order to leverage its power in search in order to compete with Facebook. Google’s Circles were touted as a core differentiator (which Facebook quickly copied). However, the true differentiator was (and remains) the ability for Google to index social traffic in its search algorithm.

-Secure Search - Google began hiding organic search details (the terms you searched) from websites if you were logged in to Google (starting first with Gmail, but now across Google properties). Now, 15-30% of a site’s organic traffic is “unknown”.

-Freshness Update - Targeted at news results, Google changed its rankings to display the most recent content first. In essence, the more recent the content, the more likely it will be to come up in the top results.

-Search plus Your World - Google now indexes your social feed and includes results from your feed ahead of other natural searches, so all search results are personalized for you—when you are logged in to a Google account (and to a lesser degree, even when you are not). Now, each person’s results are clearly different from each another’s.

-Penguin - The change will lower the search engine rankings of pages that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google has signaled an intent to penalize sites that over-engineer the search results using keyword-stuffing techniques. The penalties will be targeted at the worst offenders.

So where does all this lead?  In order to be continually ahead of the curve you need to be prepared for constant change.  By working with Astir IT Solutions and Astir Analytics, we can put our SEO and development resources to work for you.

Give me a call, I would love to explain the Astir difference.

Bob Markowitz

Executive Vice President

bobm@astirit.com

(908) 279-8670 ext. 704

SEO