Search engine optimalization was easy some years ago. All you needed was your normal site and add a lot of keywords under that in white, and you’d rank high in the SERP’s. That trick got recognised by Google and other search engines soon enough, but others were still being used.

In May of 2005 a lot of Dutch insurance companies were actually banned from google for cloaking. A spider sends a specific signature to the server to identify itself, with cloaking a different page is presented to the spider than is to normal users. Obviously the spider pages were filled with keywords, and thus gave a better ranking. Then google changed their algorithms, most likely because they found out about cloaking as well, and the sites got banned totally.

Simple changes to the search and indexing algorithms can have big changes on your rankings in on SERPs. But, these small changes you can live with and adapt too. In the not too distant future however there will be personalized searches. Just look at the amount of information google has of a regular user already. Gmail, friends from orkut, everything you ever searched for. Everything gets logged.

Now assume I’m doing the seo for an art website. I’d be checking where that site is in the SERPs for a number of keywords, and i’d continue to check that for a period of time. So, now google has a list of the keywords i’m interested in, and if I ever in fact clicked the link I was looking for that would be logged as well. So, I’d be far more likely to get that site as a first result than someone who never looks at art.

And not only that, because of orkut google knows who my friends are, and what information they look for. Obviously, i’ll be looking for the same stuff. Now google also has the desktop search functionality. How long will it be before they come with a small plugin that checks what programs you have open as to point your search in the right direction. For example, if I have flash open, than chances are I’ll be looking for actionscript when I look for substrings.

So when there’s no way to determine what someone else sees when looking at a SERP then how would I know that my seo is working? How do you deal with this? Well, generally, the same tips as ever work. Make sure that your pages are easily indexed, use keywords, get links. But most of all, make good content. And wait to see what the future will bring.

Related posts

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 11:59 by Sonja Duijvesteijn and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.