2011 Has Been an Interesting Year

With the numerous Panda updates from Google in 2011, it’s been an interesting year, the seo forums have been echoing with cries of “why has my site dropped from the search results”, the answer usually being something to do with how they have had large amounts of duplicate content across their domains, sometimes intentional, as with those who spin articles to bolster their content, but also sometimes for those who simply did it by accident.

The general upshot being that many old school techniques simply do not work any longer, there are still plenty of companies out there offering spinning and submission services, although there are still some offering search engine submission services, which have been worthless for many years now (because the search engines will find you site anyway through the links pointing towards it, and if it doesn’t have them, it’s not going to rank anyway, just in case you were wondering!)

The ever increasing number of seo blogs out there are keeping increasingly up to date with the latest news about what does and doesn’t work in this fast changing environment. Whilst I’m on the subject WordPress blogs still seem a firm favourite with Google even though many of them aren’t really worth reading, but I guess it’s also used by many which do contain great high quality content, so I expect that will continue for a while.

Personally the thing I find most surprising is that Google (I always talk about Google as they send me the most traffic, as soon as Bleko, Bing or Ask do, I will talk about them instead) still p[lace so much emphasis on exact match domain names, it does look like it has lost a little weight over the last year, but it’s certainly still a major factor in the ranking algorithm.

The seo software companies have also stepped up their game, the seomoz tools have been constantly improved and a lot of new products are entering the market, some good, some bad and some are just a complete waste of money.

So it’s going to be an interesting year next year, I expect social media will become a bit more of a focus.