Google’s has already began adding Google+ brand pages in results, to leverage Google profiles for ‘rel=author’ tags. Google+ circles and +1s have been made visible in SERPs. This pattern, it’s felt, would become a concerted attempt on part of the search engine giant to link up promotional efforts in organic (search) results with the former’s login/verification system. In other words, it will become tougher to ensure SEO success sans using Google+
A push to popularize Google+
The idea would be not only to prompt a greater usage of the social network, but also to arm them with an ability to collate social, ranking and visibility signals. This would also give a further push towards fighting spam and manipulation, to an extent, another area of concern for the search major. In fact, it is being predicated that Google will finally decide to initiate stern, Panda-style action to check manipulative link spam. There are some obviously undesirable links from sites that should be discounting at several pages. The engine’s search quality team can be expected to take steps to rectify this.
Apart from an effort to check on manipulative link spam, what else is supposed to be the core of developments in the vast search-scape. As we have discussed in the previous post, we can expect a few developments taking place on the search and social front. First, social and SEO will get intertwined further, to leverage their respective strengths. Keyword-anonymous searchers would probably dominate the scene.
Further algorithmic changes
Some time during the year, it is believed the search quality team of Google will bring about algorithmic changes in the way they evaluate low-quality links to do away with the linkspam and strengthen the credibility of Google search results. Experts are advising against overly pushy search ads, forcing out organic results, leading to an undue paid search markup.
One positive for marketers though, is that a better integration with the fledgling social platform will benefit those who do harness SEO/ social media strategies with a degree of skill and aptitude. It’s also likely to be a blessing in disguise for white hat tactics, which help build brand signals even while curtailing the overall effectiveness of ‘exploits’ that seemingly manipulate (such as anchor text link spam or exact match domains). The other side of it is that Google is probably going to gather much more data about the user’s online behavior pattern, making them a more powerful and overreaching force than they are currently on the web.
According to a Comscore estimate, Bing and Yahoo! lay claim to 30% of the US search market compared to Google’s 65%. Sources such as Statcounter (that consider traffic websites get rather than queries by a sample audience) show Google share, much higher at 82% and that of Bing+Yahoo! at 16%. This pattern should continue, though Bing should be able to record a reasonable growth in its market share as the year progresses.
