Did SEO just get a little easier?

For a couple of days now the great and the good of search and online marketing have been at Pubcon, Las Vegas; America’s leading SEO, SEM and Social Media conference.

There have been a number of keynotes featuring the top players in the industry and some exciting stories have come from the show already, with news that has had the inevitable mixed reactions.

Exciting news from Pubcon

For those of us unable to attend we can only watch the live blogging and try catch the latest snippets of news. So far there have been 2 notes that have caught my eye and made me place a hold on some of the advice I would normally give to clients.

1. In Barry Schwartz’ liveblog of the discussion “How Do You Optimize For Universal and Personal Search?” there was a not in the speech by Brian Combs, that “Thirds party rankings and reviews likely do not matter for rankings anymore.” And..
    
2. In the Keynote “Hot Google Topics & Trends” the point was made that Googlebot will be given the task of determining where on the page content appears and using that to determine its relevancy to the page.

These may seem like minor points but for quite a while now we have been led to believe that Google was paying attention to offsite and 3rd party reviews, and there have been a number of tactics used by professional SEO aware developers to make sure that content was placed favourably within the source code, i.e. at the top.

So do we need to change our SEO tactics?

Should we stop pushing for 3rd Party reviews?

Dealing with the first point first I don’t believe we do. Previously companies had to seek out and push the appearance of third party reviews as they would give credibility and non-pagerank authority to a site, however this has always had problems, in that because these review systems all use different metrics, and often different coding, it would be very hard for Google to understand what was a good review. So it was believed for a long time that they would have to fall back solely on their own reviews systems included within Google Places.

This would be a safe assumption except that Google is currently facing some serious challenges in the form of an investigation of Anti-competitive practices, one point being that Google would only use reviews on Google properties in their ranking algorithm. So it looks like, for the time being that reviews don’t help your ranking.

So should we stop pushing reviews? Nope, no way.

It has been shown that SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation go hand in hand and if reviews fulfil any purpose, it is increasing the conversion rates and customer satisfaction levels. 3rd Party reviews are also very useful, for giving more access routes to your website, so even if they don’t increase your ranking they DO increase the amount of sales you should be getting.

So that’s reviews, er… reviewed, what about the clever CSS we do to push content to the top of the site? Should we stop doing this?

How good Coding can help SEO

To explain a bit more to those not familiar with coding websites; On a modern website, information is held in boxes called Divs, and the size and placement of these Divs is declared within the Cascading Style Sheet, a file which sits separate to the html file, allowing you to simply write text and then have it magically render as a cool looking web page.

Now when Googlebot rolls through your site you want to present the most important information first and coding html can sometimes mean that what appears to be at the top of your website actually appears lower than halfway down the source code, making it more difficult for Google to read through to the content and burying important headings and other text below the bumph that makes up your header, nav menu, and breadcrumb trails etc.

Now in theory Googlebot getting smarter should make life easier for us, no need to employ great developers anymore because Google will figure out what we meant despite the code being as wheezy as an old Morris Minor. Right?

Well this is where we’re going to have to wait and see a little bit. This development is one that sits in the balance of the philosophical quandary that various interviews have shown over the past two years.

On the one hand Google wants to give equal chance to rank to privately (often poorly) made websites that contain GREAT content. These websites are the underground of information. The Ying to the Yang of big news corporation that away from emergencies and conflicts are often spreading news that is a bit lukewarm, so of course Google wants them to rank well.

On the other hand, Google wants to give its searchers a quality experience and thus wants to hold the sites that rank to a certain level of quality so that they don’t lose market share from people who are looking at superficial factors.

To our mind, good coding is never wasted so we’ll stick to our ethos of making our client sites as good as they can be, whether or not it actually helps with the ranking.