The fight for ranking on the 1st place on Google has never been more fierce than now, and with an estimated yearly spending on American search advertising of more than $36 billion in 2017, never have there been so many SEO agencies offering their services. So what is the latest rumors, and what are the trends about today in the world of search engine optimization?
Google has become smarter and better
Google has invested heavily into automating their search algorithms, and enhancing them with AI over the last few years and it has become increasingly difficult to figure out what signals are used and what weight they have individually prior to just a few years ago. The ranking systems in place are now much more dynamic than before, which has meant that the weighting of the many different signals is now also different, depending on which keyword or search phrase you use. Looking for something news related, the novelty (freshness) of an article will be weighted much higher, even without strong backlinks, than if you are searching for evergreen content with information on topics that won’t grow stale, in which case backlinks are still a strong factor. And not only that, but as traditional advertising agencies also focus on SEO these days, the competition has in turn gotten smarter as well.
Topic relevancy is important for SEO
On the vast majority of searches, the domain’s total subject coverage – or relevance if you like – will have a very large impact on the ranking. A large and well-arranged website full of good full information on a single topic, can easily outrank a site with several hundreds of good backlinks that covers many different niches. Some people speculate that domains are given a score by Google, so called informative rankings, that help place certain results very high on searches, more or less without any backlinks, leading to a new sort of abuse in terms of topical networks.
Expired domains no longer works
A lot of people have jumped on the wave of buying expired domains for ranking purposes, and over the years services have cropped up offering people a way to by expensive expired domains hoping to be able to benefit from the inbound links to the domains. However, Google is no slouch and as always on the forefront of fighting manipulations, so they have announced that domains that change ownership and subsequently shift their tone in terms of content, or if the quality are not within the same style as before, then domains will get devalued in terms of incoming links.
Social links have value
Having just a few backlinks and links from large Facebook profiles as well as G + profiles may be enough to rank a personal or informative site better than some businesses that actively build links. SEO Services are now also more and more involved with social media, becoming as much online reputation managers, as technical search engine experts. And while links from most social media are nofollow, some people are speculating that Google now considers traffic/popularity and other similar “social” factors into their algorithms, at an increasing weight. While the SEO community seems divided on this issue, it is going to be a highly debated issue in 2018 for sure.
Work hard and rank well
It is important to understand the necessity of neutral information on a domain and broad subject coverage. You can have many products in your webshop with super good unique texts and lots of images, but if your overall strategy is not including a way of combining all of this into a process in which you gain links and followers, then you need to change something.
