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5 Things to Keep an Eye
on in the SEO World in 2005....
by: Bobby Heard |
| After
the latest PR update at Google and
MSN’s beta search going live, there
is one thing for certain in 2005: the
world of search is in for some major
changes. There has been growing
speculation around the SEO world that
reciprocal linking is a thing of the
past. Rumors are abound that PR means
less and less, if anything. Bill Gates
came out of his cave to say that
“Today’s search is
nothing” and that it won’t be
that way for long. There are quiet
rumblings in the SEO back alleys of a
new, state-of-the-art search engine
currently indexing the internet. Websites
are dropping off the face of the planet.
And we’re all left to sit here and
put together the pieces. So what is in
store for 2005? 1) Reciprocal links, while
not becoming totally dead, are decreasing
in value, and there will most likely be
an algorithm update to lessen their
importance. The original thought process
behind the importance of a link was that
it was seen as a “vote” for the
linked-to site. Now that reciprocal links
are everywhere, it is hardly a great way
to count “votes” for a website.
Reciprocal linking will continue around
the internet, although the amount of
people who try to get away with one-way
links (by never getting back to you once
you’ve added their link) will
increase significantly. This will, of
course, be an attempt to acquire one-way
links, which brings us to our next
subject....
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| 2)
One-way links and triangle linking,
though already quite popular, should
explode over the course of 2005. Both are
much harder to control and acquire, which
makes Google happy. The triangle link
“ploy” makes links look like
one-way links even though “Site
A” is returning the favor to
“Site B” through “Site
C”. There will be attempts to sell
triangle linking programs and systems by
SEO companies, however, the complexity,
difficulty and time involved in this
scheme will produce ridiculous prices. 3) What this
about a new search engine that is going
to index every site on the internet,
EVERY 10 seconds? Become.com has turned a few
heads with it’s claims. Site owners
have reported Become Bots spidering
“like crazy”. It’s all
quite hush, hush, however and you need to
have an invite in order to test it out.
It should be interesting to see what
they’re capable of if and when they
decide to go live. I’ll go out on a
limb and say that it’s a household
name by this time next year.
4) MSN
will scrap the “beta” tag on
February 1st from it’s sparkling new
search engine, which is currently live at
search.msn.com and Bill Gates
thinks it will rival Google. There is a
lot of debate over this issue, but there
is no denying that it is far better than
the old chugger they were using before.
Love him or hate him, Gates has most
likely given a hard right to the chin of
Yahoo!, which seems to be suffering from
a magnitude of quality problems. MSN will
be second to Google in total searches in
2005.
5) PR
still has importance. However, it is also
decreasing in value. PR is only based on
the quantity and quality of links (both
inbound and outbound) from the given web
page. The most obvious reasoning for the
declining importance theory is due to the
fact that on any given search on Google,
the PR of each page seems to have barely
any correlation with it’s place in
the rankings. For all you PR lovers out
there, hold on to your toolbar’s
tight, because this could be a bumpy
ride.
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| About The Author Bobby Heard is
the Vice-President of Abalone Designs (www.abalone.ca), which offers
great SEO results at affordable prices.
bheard@abalone.ca
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