How Google’s Upcoming Algorithm Change Effects Your SEO

Dear Friends,

I wanted to take a moment and mention some interesting new developments in SEO.

The first development that should interest you is that Yahoo’s search is no longer powered by Google. Yahoo announced several months ago that they were looking into it. On July 29, 2010, Yahoo and Bing announced that they’d reached a deal, and rolled out tests. Yahoo is now 100% powered by Bing.

Why this matters to you:
While Yahoo lost market share to Google in 2006, they’ve steadily increased over the last few years. Likewise, Bing has taken a bite out of Google’s dominance. While Google still controls 71% of the search market, Yahoo’s shift to Bing has moved it’s 14% out from under Google’s influence. The team-up of search’s second and third engines has concerned Google enough that they’re completely overhauling their algorithms.

Google’s algorithm change:
All of the search engines are constantly changing the equations that determine result relevance. This time, Google’s actually announced a change. Previously, Google had streamlined results from sites so that only one or two would appear. This change will make deeper pages appear as well, as long as they’re relevant.

Why Google’s change matters to you:
Previously, home pages were given the greatest relevance. This is one of the reasons blogs became so effective (fresh, content-heavy home pages ranked better). This shift makes optimizing all of the lower pages as well as having lots of content-rich lower pages even more important. It also means that companies need to lighten up even more about which pages their visitors see, and make sure that links to the content they want prospects to see are prominent and available on all pages.

Social Networking had already removed much of the customer experience from companies’ hands. This strips off yet another layer of control. The effective take-home is that the basics still apply to any site design:

• Solid content
• Cyclical Navigation
• Attention to detail on every page

Those who let the basics slip to get on the latest fad will now struggle to rebuild their infrastructure.

Sincerely,
Angela Render
Thunderpaw
lioness@thunderpaw.com
571-331-5941

• Site Launch: Blind Curves
• Site Launch: Linda Crill Enterprises
• Site Redesign: BDA (Formally RBDA)
• Site Launch: Eberle Builders
• Success Story: E-tailer doubles Facebook following in a quarter
• Success Story: E-tailer experiences exponential increase in Twitter followers