6 Major Google Changes Reveal the Future of SEO

The last few weeks have been amazing. Google has made some big changes and they are all part of a longer term strategy that has many components.

In short, Google is doing a brilliant job of pushing people away from tactical SEO behavior and toward a more strategic approach.

You could argue that "tactical SEO is dead", but that's not quite right. And don't run around saying "SEO is dead" because that is far from the truth, and I might just scream at you.

Instead, let's take a few steps back and understand the big picture. Here's a look at the major developments, some of Google's initiatives driving this change, and the overall impact these changes will have on SEO.

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5 Social Media Advertising Trends to Watch for in 2014

Social media advertising is what traditional search engine marketing was 5 years ago: constantly in development with major changes coming every other week. That's not to say that SEM has stagnated and development has stopped – it hasn't (enhanced campaigns anyone?).

The point is that 2013 has seen more changes and big leaps forward in social media advertising then any year before. The development boom hasn't slowed down at all this year and is propelling the entire social media space forward into 2014.

Here are five trends in social media advertising to watch out for next year.

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How SEO Greed Can Ruin A Perfectly Good Linking Strategy

By now, you are likely aware of the Rap Genius “Tweet In Exchange For Anchor Text” link scheme, hencefore to be known as TieFating.

Barry Schwartz reported last week on John Marbach’s exposé of the popular music site, Rap Genius, which had started an “affiliate” program in order to get links pointing to their website. After it was exposed, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, said, “we’re aware and looking into it.” The site was then officially penalized for link schemes.

In a nutshell, the folks at Rap Genius offered to tweet a link with a URL to any blogger that linked to the Rap Genius site using specific keyword rich anchor text to the lyrics of very specific songs by very specific artists. In exchange for these keyword rich anchor text links, Rap Genius would then tweet out a link to the blogger’s site/post, and that would result in their site getting “massive traffic.”

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7 Dead Link Building Tactics in 2014

In 2008, link building was queen (or king) when it came to ranking well in search engines. Companies dumped most of their SEO budget into link building activities designed to increase link numbers, thus ranking higher in search engines over time. Link counts were closely measured, anchor text was optimized, page 1 rankings were achieved and there was much rejoicing!

What was once an effective SEO tactic that almost everyone was doing quickly backfired during the Google Penguin update in spring of 2012. Many marketers were left scratching their heads wondering if link building was still a worthwhile tactic. Some SEO firms simply abandoned link building in favor of other tactics. Rather than spending hours and hours on link requests, they began to focus on content marketing tactics to help build organic visitors. This was a positive strategy shift but a poor understanding of how link building can be used to generate results.

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Link Building 2013: Looking Back At This Year’s Top Link Week Columns

With each passing year, search engine algorithms grow increasingly sophisticated in their ability to identify (and penalize) spammy links. Among other things, this year marked the fourth and fifth releases of Google’s spam-filtering Penguin update (Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, respectively).

Additionally, many link building tactics that were once considered legitimate were unceremoniously moved to the “spam” column in 2013. Google updated its webmaster guidelines to provide additional guidance on what they now consider to be an unnatural link, and even Bing detailed several ways not to build links.

The launch of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm and its potential impact on link building activities was also a hot topic among the link building community. Add to that the possible death of Google Toolbar PageRank, and you have quite an eventful year for all the linkers out there!

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Google Reveals Top Searches of 2013: From Nelson Mandela to Twerking

What did you search for on Google in 2013? Were you curious about “twerking” like the many others who pushed that search query to the top of Google’s “what is” search list? Or perhaps you wanted to learn more about Nelson Mandela who garnered the No. 1 spot in Google search this year.

Whatever you searched, we lived, and Google once again made memories come alive in its end-of-year Zeitgeist video.

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7 CRO Lessons Learned in 2013

For this month’s series, we’re providing a little bit of perspective on the hectic events of 2013. As we’ve left Enhanced Campaigns pretty well covered this year, this week we’ll be dedicating our time to some of the other (non-Enhanced Campaigns) initiatives, tactics, strategies, and features that we used to excel in 2013 here at PPC Hero.

As Eric explained yesterday, December’s series is related to those things in 2013 that our team has found to be the most enlightening or crucial to continued PPC growth and/or performance. The list of things that have changed over the last year is much more expansive, but when presented with the opportunity to discuss what I found most effective in the last year – I was a bit caught off guard. How does one narrow that list down and pick just ONE?? Really, in our case, we had to pick just FIVE…but you get it.





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