New Google = New SEO

As Google algorithms evolve, so must SEO strategy. There is always a never-ending transition of old-school-new-school SEO. But until recently, Google clearly made a distinction of the SEO’s role in shaping up the search process. Below are popular SEO thoughts that are becoming myths in the “new school” SEO:

1. Making Website Pretend to be Big by Creating a Lot of Pages.

This is one familiar thought I have when starting with SEO discipline – Google loves website with a lot of pages. Well not necessarily true for today. Observe some search results on Google and compare the ones that are in Top 90-100 with those of Top 1-10. Look at the indexed pages of Google for these sites and you will find smaller websites outranked bigger websites. I am inclined to believe that SEO should go back to being technical - to make optimized pages visible to search engines, not to give search engines a number of pages we have created. Pay attention to navigational structure, on-page optimization, the rel=”canonical” tag, and content duplication. These things still matters to search engines, at least for Google.

2. Content is King.

This is the downfall of article marketing – creating a lot of contents as link farms. Panda has started abolishing such kind of practice. Although Google loves good quality content, it doesn’t necessarily mean we put as many words as we can in a single page just to make it “content rich”. In fact, Google started emphasizing on the “freshness” of content. This is a typical man-vs-machine scenario. Old school SEO is still trying to think that Google algorithms would not evolve into something akin to what has been called artificial intelligence (AI). Googlebots won’t buy cheap coding tricks anymore, but rather looks in a perspective as a user. Does this page contain brief information on what is exactly I am looking for? Or will I have to dig needle in a haystack just to get what I want from a bunch of words in a single page? User is the new King.

3. Backlinks are irrelevant.

I don’t know if it belongs to the old school or new school SEO perspective. All I know is that it is not true. The concept of Google has started using link popularity. Although the loophole is that it is quite easy to spam in backlinking, at least Google is always in combat with unscrupulous link building manipulation tactics. Not to mention that the most common source of backlinks are from social media which can also be spammed easily. I believe Google still use the traditional link signals and social link signals as factors in interpreting how popular a page can be. Google+ found on every item in search results is intended to be a social signal from a search result in response to the user’s query. More like a substitute to the sharing mechanism in social bookmarking just made easier in just one clink (link to Google profile).


As a conclusion, the latest SEO trend should answer the three basic requirements of Google and its users:

1. A website loading speed must be fast enough not to test the patience of the user.
2. The page content must be relevant to just exactly the user is looking for.
3. The page must be “crawlable” by Google spiders to it can interpret the information presented by the page.