Today Google announced that their new indexing system, Caffeine, was completely released across all their systems. Between this, and Google’s personalization of results, the SEO industry is officially dead. D-E-D…dead.
(Okay, let’s take a deep breath and think about this.)
To people that do this type of stuff, this shouldn’t be a surprise. In fact, Google started rolling out Caffeine last fall and many searchers started to be presented with personalized results. At the end of the day, Google is updating their system with an eye to future. Google is trying to make sure that they always give searchers the best results. This now includes social media updates, recently published content, and location based results.
If you really want to see the differences, create a Google Search Story and then compare the results of the video with your own searches. My money says that they’ll be different, and that my searches will yield different results than yours. All this means that “ranking #1″ for a certain search term is an antiquated idea. You might be #1 for a search term Monday-Thursday, but then a Twitter feed or Google Local results outrank you during the weekends or during full moons
(By the way, I really like the Search Story I made for HubSpot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pKWJMyrHSU)
But, focusing on rankings has always been a myopic concept. Unless you just want a lot of traffic to just have a lot of traffic, a high ranking for a search term means nothing. A smart marketer is going to find value in rankings because they produce traffic that achieves your metrics of success (e.g. conversions, time on site, pages viewed, etc.)
This means that any SEO firm or consultant that promises a #1 ranking, without telling you how it will actually help your business grow, is nothing more than a Thigh Master infomercial. All hype, but “your results may vary”.
Good content is what people want and Google is going to do everything it can to give searchers the best results. If you make a commitment to create remarkable content for your audience, and optimize it correctly, it will show up for the correct search terms. It’s your job as a business owner or marketer to then convert your traffic into sales leads or transactions.
The search optimization world isn’t ending. The sky isn’t falling. If you’ve embraced Inbound Marketing, you’re already better than your competitor that doesn’t, and now you’re going to be even further ahead.
photo by Refracted Moments
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>This means that any SEO firm or consultant that promises a #1 ranking
If a SEO consultant “promises” a number 1 ranking, for one of your target keywords, grab your wallet tight and run away.
Somehow i agree with you but if you will see new algo features, they are best….I like how new algo index, crawl and rank the results…its very fast in returning search results, indexing is in very large volume as well as importance to Real-time search and importance for accuracy
It seems that URL structure is important in Caffeine as keyword based domains names are ranking very well.
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