SEO 2006: A New Reality to Consider

Irina Ponomareva |

January 7, 2006

Category: Internet and SEO: Rambling Thoughts |

This article may be reproduced in its entirety provided the proper credit to the author is given, and a valid link to http://www.spiderfriendly.co.uk | added.

A new year has come. The delighted "Happy New Year" roar swept across the SEO forum circuit and subsided; the holiday season came slowly to its end; and new concerns and routine tasks of everyday life filled the lives of thousands of hard-working SEOs, the soldiers habitually fighting their unceasing war for the search engine rankings.

I'm not serious when using the "war" word, of course. I've always regarded the search engines - our supposed adversary - as my good friends, though their frequent whims could drive the most patient person (let alone me) mad. But I know for sure that many SEOs regard their work, quite seriously, as an eternal combat for rankings, combat with the engines and with each other, as well.

Co-operation as a new approach to SEO

Peace is a sweet word. The engines (especially Google) are tired of numerous SEOs fighting them for rankings and trying constantly to manipulate their results with zero regard for the Internet society's common good. It doesn't necessarily mean blackhat; white hat SEOs too can be overly aggressive when it comes to achieving rankings for themselves or their client. Achieving rankings for the previously agreed keywords often means receiving a payment; no wonder people are trying hard.

But the engines don't care about our success in business: they have their own success to worry about. It's pointless to yell that you have done the SEO properly and according to the rules, but didn't achieve expected rankings, and conclude that the engine in question must be bad. Those rules aren't written by the engines, so they guarantee you nothing. The engines (actually, the engineers) work on their algorithms to achieve better quality of results for the searchers. They try, fail, go back to the previous checkpoint, try again, and then eventually succeed. We work on our skills, accumulate experience, fail or succeed, go on ... and one day find out that the reality of the SE world has changed, and our experience isn't worth a penny anymore.

Isn't it enough? Isn't it time to change our approach completely and instead of asking ourselves how to tweak this or that page in order to improve our position for this or that keyword, ask ourselves what we can do to help the engines do their work properly?

That's what we can expect to be rewarded for, though not at once.

Patience 2006: a new level

Patience has always been the main virtue of an SEO, yet the level of patience we are going to need in 2006 is much higher than what we needed in 2003. It's a totally new level, because nothing is going to happen at once anymore.

It was easy in 2003 to achieve rankings even for the most competitive terms if you had a lot of money and could buy tons of links at a high price (preferably, on the home pages of highly authoritative sites). PR was a more or less accurate measure of the authority of any site (or at least there was a strong correlation), and such campaigns succeeded so often that a lot of the owners of high PR sites made selling links their main source of income. As we all know, it made the Net quite messy, and Google (at that time the only serious player on the search engine market) introduced the counter-measures. The Florida update of November 2003 was a harsh blow, and only the first one. We've survived a lot more since, and they were all about the same thing: to make quick SEO solutions a thing of the past.

Now, Google PR hardly correlates with the authority of a site anymore, or the correlation is so slight that chasing PR has become a waste of time and money. New inbound links are now given a trial period before they start working, and month after month this trial period is getting longer. Sites that won their cool positions via quick and aggressive link buying campaigns are nowhere to be seen any more, even for relatively uncompetitive search terms (I know first-hand of a few examples). New domains are given aging delay, and the more competitive the niche they belong to, the longer this period is expected to be. All attempts to shorten it through aggressive link building campaigns only make things worse.

And then, Jagger strikes, and more sites disappear (some temporarily), and then Google announces that link patterns from now on will be checked for being natural, and all links qualified as "unnatural" won't be of much (if any) value.

Panic. Hot discussions on how to define natural linking patterns. Mutual misunderstandings. Mutual insults (why are we SEOs so aggressive?). Over-simplified solutions, then anti-reciprocal propaganda. Desperation.

The reason for all this is obvious. We SEOs aren't accustomed to the concept of natural linking. Besides, we are so spoiled by years of link purchasing, link exchanges and PR leakage myths that we forgot how to link out naturally. Worse still, not just professional SEOs but the majority of webmasters who have heard anything about SEO somewhere would rather not link out because of the "what will I have for it?" syndrome (as well as "my PR is higher" foolishness). Now we realise that by the same token, not many are going to link to us if we don't offer anything in return. But as soon as we offer something in return, we break the "natural linking" concept. Vicious circle.

Co-operative linking

In order to be successful in our SEO efforts in the future, we will have to learn natural link building anew. The first step will be to learn to link out for free. Others will follow and link to us. In my previous article, I explained how to do it safely. Now, let's see how to do it reasonably.

Let's say you write an article and publish it on your site. Ask yourself where you have learned the stuff you are using. Quite likely, you will remember a couple of articles you read a few years ago. Find them among your favourites in the browser, or use Google. Then link to them. Your readers will be grateful.

Find more articles on the same topic. The author disagrees with you? That's great! Link to this article as well (that doesn't include black hat SEO articles). Your readers should be presented with different opinions and perspectives.

Now wait. The owner of the site you linked to might link to you in return (this kind of reciprocal linking will never, ever be considered unnatural, and I'm completely certain of that). Most likely, nobody will link to your article for a long, long time (see above why). That's just another good reason to exercise your patience - the new, 2006 level of SEO patience.

There is nothing new about it actually. Bloggers do it all the time. Unfortunately, links from blogs and forums were the first to be devalued by the engines (at the start of 2004 or about this time). We need to spread the same philosophy to regular sites.

There is no need to link to other sites for the sake of links only. As paradoxical as it may sound, the best way to help the engines to do their job is to forget about them for a while and think of your human guests. Link to sites you really want your readers to visit. Don't be afraid to lose a visitor. If your site is really good, people will come back. That's co-operation, too. Co-operation among webmasters.

Co-operative copywriting

The time of tools measuring keyword density is coming to its end. My most precious dream is slowly coming true: the days of traditional SEO copywriting are almost numbered. The engines are becoming semantic, and now they want semantically correct copy, not keyword densities and other primitive things of the early years of SEO. Now, if the copy sounds awkward, we can try and replace a keyword with a synonym (chances are, the rankings won't suffer; probably, they will even improve). Derivatives are now counted, as well. Semantically correct pages beat stuffed pages hands down! A writer's heaven.

I feel blessed. A year or two more and the engines will learn how to detect a doorway on the fly and throw it out at once (preferably, together with the offending domain). It is already happening in Google - now and again I'm seeing doorway pages marked as Supplemental Results.

I'm looking forward to the day when the cursed business of professional doorway creators will be wiped out from the face of the earth. Spammers don't understand ethical talk; as long as their spam makes them richer they only laugh at such stuff. But they are very sensitive to their failures. Actually, that's the only thing that can convince them.

New SEO mania: old domains

Of course, aging delay is here to stay (to the great annoyance of the owners of new sites). I think it will only get longer as the months go by. I've got a few explanations in my mind of the effect (material for future articles). The fact is, old domains (6 or 7 years old) are now pure gold, as they usually flourish in the competitive SERPs. Of course, their prices reflect it.

Many SEOs are already buying tons of such old domains (regardless of the price). They hope to use them in their future SEO campaigns and outsmart Google again.

The counter-measures are obvious. Applying a new aging delay to sites that have changed their owner and the topic isn't hard. Applying it to sites that changed the owner and were 301'd to something irrelevant is an easy thing to do, as well. How about the sites that changed the owner and were immediately (and aggressively) re-optimised? Or the sites that were bought and set aside for a while in order to be used later for one of the purposes mentioned above?

Go ahead and buy as many old domains as you can afford, oh naive one! Can't you find a better way to spend your money? Or are you just too rich to be bothered?

New hopes

2006 is not going to be an easy year for the SEO industry. I find it very likely that a lot of us will be forced to leave it and find other work to do. Major Google updates are going to happen more frequently, and I'm sure Yahoo! and MSN will follow, generally, the same course. There is no choice for the engines of the near future but to fight primitive manipulations and encourage quality web building.

And the updates are not going to be smooth. Most likely we will see weird results much more often than improved results - a necessary sacrifice. And of course, it is not going to be easy to explain to our clients, over and over again, that we can't magically put their sites back to where they were before the update. The only way to handle it is to wait through it. Many clients will walk away in the process (#1 for their favourite keyword is still the only thing most people really want, and I understand why). At the same time, the demand for SE-friendly web design and quality copywriting will increase.

And more. To those who traditionally stick to whitehat, co-operative SEO methods, the updates are far less dangerous than to those who still think they can shortcut the engines and/or deceive them. Jagger has proven it. Most of the pure white hats reported minimal loss or none at all. For many, it was just temporary, and Jagger3 brought back what Jagger1 had taken. Writing as someone who survived Jagger relatively unharmed, I now know that the engines appreciate co-operation. That's why I look forward to the 2006 SEO year with optimism, against all odds.

Once again, Happy New Year to all!