It has been 1 year, 7 months and 25 days since my last post on this blog…
During that time I did a lot of work on client websites and setting up websites to earn money as an affiliate. From the later I learned the most on how search engine optimization has changed in that timespan.
In The Netherlands where I live Google has a market share of almost 99% so you can imagine that SEO here is heavily focused on how to get top rankings in Google.
With the Google Panda update (yes, it hit the Netherlands too) a lot of Affiliate sites dropped in rankings and in visitor numbers. Other large content websites learned from other countries where Panda was rolled out before and prepared for the upcoming algo chance.
Basically the quality of the content and being user friendly has gained importance. Again you see that thinking from a user perspective works best and if you focus on ROI and conversion you have the best strategy.
Google+ and Other Social Networks
Social networking is the big hype in search engine optimization and everybody is focused on scoring well on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others.
Google+ is growing fast and I must admit that I just recently started to use it. That is the drawback that I am in the Netherlands, I have to wait for it to open up by Google…
Google takes social networks into account for their rankings, so if you have a lot of followers on Twitter it will improve your status.
But… what I see now with a increasing number of people around me is that they move away from social networks. People seem to have lost the urge to share what they think and are more and more concerned about their privacy.
If you look at the biggest social networking site in Holland which is hyves.nl you see that in the last six months they lost 18% of their traffic.
Source Alexa.com
Several of those visitors are now on Facebook getting connected to friends. Most of those Hyves users that are now on Facebook are youngsters who use a Blackberry and WhatsApp to keep up with their social network.
Now my questions to you is: Do you see the same behavior in your off-line social networks?
Is it a general decline that will eventually hit all of those sites, or is it related to the economic recession? Could that mean that people will share good news, but not the bad things that happen in their life…
And if it is a general decline, what would that mean for search engine optimization?
I do foresee that a lot of people are going to reduce their use of Twitter and Facebook updates, mainly to reduce the current information overload brought onto them by those social networks…
P.s. The site is now on another theme based on the Genesis WordPress Theme Framework by StudioPress to show my renewed focus on SEO and its future. I hope you like it.
With regards to the Panda update, is there an issue with syndicated content. I am talking about same content from the owner being posted on article directories and web 2.0 blogs. There are many people who confuse syndication versus duplication.
Matt cutts recently revealed that google doesn’t consider social signals to rank websites except google plus. What is your view on the same?
@kamalesh: It’s not the socials signals that are so relevant, it’s more important to build your brand and authority. Facebook and Twitter can help you with that to spread the word on the web if people link to your articles.
Google will not include the twitter of facebook links as a ranking factor, you need to use those sites as an extra traffic source and hope your followers or friends will link to you from their own website pages.
You will find plenty of ways to discover SEO. If you do not understand what search engine optimization is and you need to find out more, I recommend beginning out by reading through a books.
It’s really good that you didn’t give up if it had been that long since your last post. Don’t give up. It’s always still worth trying more.