Search engine optimisation has had a relatively short history of around 20 years but it has undergone many changes in that short period. We have seen a move away from the use of the keywords meta tag, the rise in the importance of inbound links to a page and more recently more emphasis being placed on high quality, original content. Now we may have seen a glimpse into the future of search engines through a video that Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam fighting team has released. The video is in answer to the question “Will back links lose their importance?”
Matt raises some interesting points in relation to the direction that Google is moving. In the video he explains that at the moment inbound links to a website are a useful signal for determining the authority of the site. In a nutshell the more links you have the higher your authority because an inbound link is counted as a vote of confidence in the quality of the page that is being linked to.
While knowing the authority of a page is useful to a search engine it is not of that much interest to a user who wants an answer to a specific query. Users want information that relates to their query and they also want the best information that satisfies that query to appear first. One of the factors that could influence this would be the author of the article. An example of this might be a query about British politics, if you had a choice between an article written by myself or one by Jeremy Paxman then you would probably choose the article from Mr Paxman. On the other hand if the query related to search engine optimisation then you would, I hope, choose an article of mine over one from Jeremy Paxman.
Matt says that Google will take who is the author of a page as a ranking system. It can be inferred from this that the more authority that an author has the better a page will rank in the future because the author has proven over time that they provide quality content. What is interesting is how Google will decide on the authority of an author. At the moment it is likely to be influenced by the number of inbound links into the articles that the author has previously published.
The other nugget of information that Matt reveals is that Google are looking at ways to introduce conversational based results. They have already started to make advances in this field, if you have the Google app installed on your smartphone or tablet then you can not only conduct a voice search and, depending upon the query, the answer is spoken back to you. You can also then ask supplemental questions that are context related. Let me give you an example. Open the app and ask each of these questions in turn, wait for the answer and then ask the next question:
Who is David Cameron?
How old is he?
Is he married?
Do they have any children?
You will notice that in the first question I mention David Cameron by name, but after that Google understands that when I say “he” in the subsequent questions I am referring to David Cameron and answers accordingly.
Voice search will become more widespread over time for the simple reason that it is easier to speak than to type. Try asking Google a question such as “Where is the nearest coffee shop?” and you will get a results page that shows all the coffee shops within four miles and orders them according to my proximity to your present location. Not much use when you are at home, but imagine how advantageous it would be when you are in a different town to be able to ask Google in the same way that you might ask a stranger for information. Would you trust a stranger or Google the most?
The implications of contextual search are enormous and those that will benefit the most from contextual search are those that provide the correct signals to Google to answer specific questions. This means that websites will need to provide quality content and be well coded, using structured mark up. I will talk about structured mark up and how it impacts search engine optimisation in future articles.