Are There Search Engine Optimization Lessons From Google’s Latest Info Release

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

It’s a long title, but then Google’s latest blog post by by Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality, is not exactly short either. However, after reading what he had to say I had a reread wondering what lessons it might hold for search engine optimization consultants – and there were a few.

The first little tidbit that struck me was the comment about search terms: “We also need to understand the queries people pose, which are on average fewer than three words…“. So lesson number one when it comes to search engine optimization is to concentrate on keyword and keyword phrases of three words or less. He followed that with a comment on Page Rank:

The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system.

So for all naysayers, PageRank is not quite dead. Mind you, he did not say to what extent PageRank was used. I still hold by my philosophy that whilst my PageRank means little to me, when I am seeking content to link to or from as part of my search engine optimization strategy, PageRank is still an indicator of page authority. So lesson number two: Don’t discard PageRank just yet.

This statement was interesting and should give rise to some thought:

In 2007, we launched more than 450 new improvements, about 9 per week on the average.

From that quote, lesson number three has to be: What works today may not work tomorrow. Google is constantly changing so our search engine optimization strategies have to revised frequently particularly if we notice a sudden dip in search results placements.

For ‘black hat’ proponents comes the following quote:

There is a whole team that concentrates on fighting webspam and other types of abuse. That team works on variety of issues from hidden text to off-topic pages stuffed with gibberish keywords, plus many other schemes that people use in an attempt to rank higher in our search results. The team spots new spam trends and works to counter those trends in scalable ways; like all other teams, they do it internationally.

The lesson number four, from this quote, is fairly straightforward: Don’t try to cheat the system. If your search engine optimization strategies are not within Google’s realm of fair play they will eventually find you out and penalize you. High placement for a short period of time is not worth the long negative effects.

The final lesson is one that we all know, users are becoming more sophisticated and over time their search queries are becoming more complex. Whilst lesson number one was to optimize for three keywords or less per search, the reality is that into the future searches will be using sentences. Lesson number five has to be: Prepare for change. How and when you do that will be dependent on the type of website you have. Eventually we will have to modify our search engine optimization strategies to meet sophisticated searches, at present, it may be counterproductive.

I could almost say business as usual after seeing the five lessons from the Google blog. It is refreshing to see them come out and actually explain a little about their activities and what is involved. The real lesson from the whole statement was number five, again, something we are all familiar with; when it comes to search engine optimization, prepare for change – assess – plan – implement – reassess. The search engine optimization never ending circle.