Over the summer, Google has quietly been testing some changes to its algorithm. Many of these changes are now permanent and it’s increasingly clear that they will have a big impact on how some people practice SEO. Going forward, off-site SEO in the form of effective social media marketing will now play a more pivotal role. The primary focus of on-site SEO must shift to creating good quality content that will attract visitors via social media optimization and, by extension, will attract good quality inbound links. Content has never been more important for good search engine results than it is right now.

As we reported last week, personalized results based on user activity is having a profound effect on what visitors see and by extension, on the methods used for search engine optimization. Google’s algorithm is even more focused on the human factor and it is clear that they are working to refine their results based on true signals that a site is popular with visitors. It will be even more difficult to trick them with stuffed keywords, misspelled keywords, sneaky redirects and fabricated link networks; which we would never advise doing anyway.

One big change has been in their handling of misspelled words. Approximately two months ago, Google watchers started seeing unusual results from Google’s “Did you mean?” spelling correction suggestions. For example, this result was posted to Digg in August:

Notice that not only does Google suggest the alternate spelling; the top two results include it.

Over the last couple of weeks, some pretty dramatic changes in search results have been reported by Google watchers like Patrick Altoft and Danny Sullivan. Along with the new focus on personalization, these changes to the way that they handle misspellings may have a sharp impact on traffic to sites that formerly ranked for these spellings because that all important number one spot has been shifted two spots lower on the page.

Depending on the perceived importance of the listing, Google may give the top ranking spot to the listing with the spelling that Google thinks you mean (as the “baby” versus “babby” listing above shows). On the one hand, this is a positive move as it puts a serious kink in the practice of deliberately misspelling words to try to capitalize on that small subset of searchers who don’t provide the right spelling for their search term. Searchers are now more likely to find what they are really looking for even if their spelling is not perfect and unscrupulous site owners can’t “steal” visitors by purposely targeting their site to misspelled brand names in an attempt to steal visitors searching for your brand name. In particular, buying up misspelled versions of popular domains will no longer be an easy way to get traffic to your site for a popular keyword. As long as Google gets it right, this actually makes SEO easier – no more having to find a creative way to include a popular misspelling on the page. Google will figure out it out. Unfortunately, Google may not always get it right.

The principal problem comes when Google decides that your brand name is a misspelling of a more popular brand. For example, Google has decided that anyone searching for Soni must be looking for Sony:

If you actually were looking for SONI (System Operators of Northern Ireland), you have to scroll pretty far down the page to find them. While this definitely puts an end to the strategy of trying to poach visitors by targeting site misspellings, it’s a little tough on any site whose brand name is tagged as a misspelling of another more popular site.  Of course, personalization should quickly bump the true site to the top of the page for any Irish system operators out there who may be worried about getting good results but all the same, this is a concern if your brand name is similar to a more popular one.

For most sites, this will be a welcome change and if you have been creating good keyword relevant content on your site and building high quality inbound links from trusted and relevant sites, you may notice little change. For any sites that have been counting on Gray Hat techniques like targeting misspellings, it looks like it’s time to change your strategy. To do that here are three good tips for making sure that these new changes don’t negatively impact your site:

1. Target your brand name both on-site and off-site particularly if it could potentially be interpreted as a misspelling of another brand name. In other words, include your brand name in your title tag and in inbound links to your site as well as your keywords. If you’ve been using brand misspellings as a tactic for SEO, you can stop now.

2. Cultivate good quality inbound links for your site from other sites that are specifically relevant to your brand. In particular, boost your authority rating for that keyword so that it holds its own and has less chance of being considered a spelling error.

3. Create quality content that will appeal to visitors. In particular, make sure your title tags and description tags are high quality content that will encourage visitors to click on your link. Even better, other site owners in your sector of the internet may want to link to your site specifically for the content and make no mistake, quality links are more important than ever.

Making your site more attractive to visitors will elevate your rankings in the visitor’s personalized search results and they may even vote your site up in Google’s new Search Wiki. While speculation that this will be used by Google to rank websites is premature, we need to consider the possibility that any time Google has data about site popularity that they can trust, they will use it. Does this mean that you should vote up your site in the search results? Well, it probably can’t hurt for you to vote your own site up in the search results but don’t count on that having any big effects at the moment. Google has undoubtedly figured out that this can be easily abused and any use that they make of the data will take this into account.

So, the bottom line on Google’s new changes is that for honest site owners, by and large, these changes will work to protect your brand and make it easier for searchers to find the results that they are looking for. Even so, these new changes may have unexpected effects on search engine rankings depending on each website’s individual situation and every site owner should take a good look at their recent results in case a change in strategy is required. As with any algorithmic change, there will be bumps in the road, but sticking to Best Practices for SEO and above all remembering that Content is King will carry you through.

There has been a lot of buzz lately on the topic of personalized search and the death of SEO. In a widely viewed interview at PubCon 2008, Bruce Clay discussed the implications of personalized search for search engine rankings by announcing that “ranking is dead”and urging webmasters to focus less on whether or not they have a number one ranking and more on questions like:

- Did I get the conversion I was after?
- Did I really deliver on the promise of SEO?

He is not alone in this view. Andrew Wetzler, President of Morevisibility, in a recent issue of Revenue Magazine also takes up the call for webmasters to focus on optimizing sites for conversion.

Personalized search results definitely affect the importance of ranking as a metric for search engine optimization and from one point of view, they can be considered dead as a reliable metric. After all if everyone gets a different result, ranking number one for a keyword becomes virtually meaningless. However, that doesn’t mean that the content of a website cannot influence its rankings overall.

By focusing on making the pages more relevant to the user, not only can you improve conversion rates, but it could actually lead to better rankings, even in a personalized search world. If a page is well-optimized for a particular search term and users like it, it should rank well in search engine results pages for any user that is truly looking for that product or service, even if your page is not the first one that the user finds and clicks on. By choosing pages that are similarly relevant to yours, all pages that also meet those relevancy standards are boosted in the results. Focusing the optimization of your pages for what your users want is optimizing for rankings in personalized search.

Where the idea of ranking becomes truly obsolete is with the old Black Hat practices of trying to trick search engines into giving a page a high ranking for an irrelevant search term just to get lots of hits to the site. For those of us who have been working on fine tuning our page keyword targeting and content to attract the customers that are looking for us and getting them to convert as customers, personalized search may actually make very little difference. For example, we have noted that unless you are constantly clicking on the same website for a particular search, the rankings that appear based on your search activity in Google are not all that different from what would normally appear, although over time, the sites displayed tend to focus on a particular theme to a greater extent.

The average user who clicks on the same site every time is probably just looking for that website in particular, is using search to find it and is essentially just the same as a direct traffic source. Any searcher who is really and truly searching should get roughly the same results as any other user with only minor differences in ranking. In fact, this could even be a boon for some sites where their results are mingled in with other interpretations of the keyword. After all, a search for apples could be fruit or computers. If all the results are personalized for fruit, then a site that might not have appeared on the first page in regular results pages could actually be more prominent in personalized search.

Google’s tracking of user search habits has prompted new speculation about how they may be changing their ranking factors. Some have suggested that they will be taking bounce rate into account – effectively they could be tracking searcher behavior to see if users “bounce” off a link instead of continuing on to explore the site. While this is a compelling notion, the implementation of this would be fraught with difficulties for search engines as David Harry points out in his exhaustive post on the issues surrounding the question of bounce rate as a factor.  While Google would love to be able to find a metric that is less prone to spam than inbound links, bounce rate would be even easier for spammers to manipulate and is unlikely to ever become a serious factor without some kind of measures put into place to control the spamming.

That said, Google can’t help but be tempted by all of the new social network activity. After all, the basic idea behind linking as a measure of site importance was based on popularity – we often refer to those links as a vote of popularity for your site. Compared to linking, social media is a virtual cornucopia of popularity indices. This isn’t all speculation. Google has been reaching out to social media developers with their Open Social API program. This week, their Adwords group sponsored a webinar introducing their marketing partners to social media. It will be interesting to see how these new opportunities affect search engine results and the internet marketing industry in general.

As we have said before, getting visitors to your site requires promotion and keeping them there requires good quality, relevant content that will engage them and maybe even convince them to convert to become a customer. Search engine optimization, in the sense that you are trying to trick a search engine may well be on the way out, but the art of creating good web content and promoting it in a productive way is coming of age. Social media networking and interactive marketing tactics provide creative ways for websites to be found and come to prominence in the new web environment. In the old sense of the acronym, SEO is dead, but in the new world of interactive internet marketing, we’re just getting started.

This weekend, Yahoo announced another algorithm update. That makes 8 updates this year and in some cases, with big consequences for search engine rankings for some sites. While this might seem like a lot, it’s actually not as many as last year (although the year isn’t over yet). However, in the past two years, it’s clear that Yahoo has been actively working to improve its offering on the search front.

Many pundits have been sounding Yahoo’s death knells lately, so it’s easy to forget that Yahoo is still a formidable force in cyberspace. A comparison of www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.live.com shows that while Yahoo may not have the search volume of Google, they definitely have significant traffic to their domain – and involved traffic at that:

That said; Yahoo’s star has definitely been fading over the last couple of years. Recent news that Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang is returning to his roots as Chief Yahoo and turning over day-to-day operations to more capable hands have not reassured investors or others in the industry. So, with all this in mind, how much should you worry about your rankings in Yahoo? It all depends on the answer to two important questions:

1. How much traffic do you currently get from Yahoo?
2. How much traffic do you want to get from search engines in the future?

If you currently depend on Yahoo for a big part of your traffic, then an algorithm update that changes their emphasis on factors that you might not be strong on could affect your traffic in a meaningful way right now. If this is the case, an algorithm update at Yahoo should be of prime concern to you. However, even if Yahoo isn’t a major source of traffic, it’s important to remember that all search engine engineers are primarily working toward giving searchers the most relevant results and if Yahoo’s engineers find the magic formula, they could regain market share. Remember that it only took Google two years to overcome Yahoo. Currently, there is still plenty of room for improvement in search engine results – even with personalization and universal search. Yahoo still has lots of great properties and really good search engine technology which, as the results we’ve seen after these recent updates show, are only getting better.

The fact that Yahoo’s algorithm updates are still going on shows that they need to be taken seriously. Naturally, if most of your traffic is coming from Google, maintaining those rankings should be foremost. However, Yahoo may rise again and when it does – or these updates find a place in the search technology of the future either through new alliances between search engines or a buy-up of Yahoo’s assets by Google or others, their search algorithm could have an effect on your rankings with those other engines. Make sure that your site is ready. Create good keyword relevant content that people want to link to and you should be a success in any good search engine.