Exact match link building will become a thing of the past
We’re already seeing exact match link building becoming less and less powerful and the logic behind it is obvious; it doesn’t look natural. If you’ve got one page with 90% back links all saying the same keyword or words you’re trying to rank for it doesn’t look natural. Most sites are seeing a marked increase in abandoning exact match link building all together and concentrating on just long tail and brand links. Google’s been banging on for a while now about how important fresh content is and it knows there’s no point having fresh content if it’s just propped up by lots artificial links.
Google will push SEO’s over to Bing
The Bing algorithm is much more reliant on social signals than Google’s which can make it harder to manipulate with the usual assortment of links and onsite content but Google are making it harder and harder to gain any visibility in the organic search results pages. More searches than not these days are being dominated by paid listings to the point where barley one organic listing is available above the fold. This coupled with Google’s increasing protectiveness over our website’s data is making it harder and harder to plan effective organic campaigns. We’re seeing higher and higher volumes in the keyword (not provided) column in Google Analytics and the only way we’re going to be able to see any referring keywords soon will be to invest in Google’s paid Adwords programme which pretty much defeats the whole purpose of SEO in the first place.
Social will become more integrated into SEO
Social is still getting bigger and bigger and 2012 doesn’t look like it’s going to be the year it starts to slow down. 2012 might well be the year it stops becoming a separate entity though and SEO’s are going to have to be able to speak fluent Twitter and Facebook if they want to retain clients and grow their sites. The past few years have seen a shift, aspects like Analytics and PPC have broken away from SEO but social is too much a part of SEO to really become separated and having one agency or department working on an SEO campaign and another agency working on the social isn’t going to be productive for either side. If your SEO isn’t a social expert too your campaign is going to be hindered.
Agencies will have to become more open
SEO may be a secretive world full of dark tactics and black hats but if you’re not proud enough of the work you’re doing to be able to shout about it from the roof tops you probably shouldn’t be doing it. Most agencies use the excuse of wanted to protect their methods but that’s not going to wash for much longer, the same goes for in house SEO’s reporting to the company MD. Even if the person you’re reporting too doesn’t understand exactly what you’re doing you can bet they’ll understand it if a competitor takes the time to explain what you’re doing wrong to them. As we become more tech savvy and understand more about the internet SEO’s are going to have to be more open about the work we’re doing and in our reporting.
Guest blogging will become devalued
A lot of SEO’s are very focused on guest blogging at the moment and right now it’s a great way to build good quality and on topic links but for how much longer? Before the end of 2012 there’s a good chance the people at Google will have tweaked their little algorithm to say that any link coming from a page with the words ‘guest post’ in doesn’t have the same value as a ‘real’ link. It took them a few years to spot any links coming from an article and devalue that, a few years later they learnt to detect spun articles and devalue those. 2012 could well be the year anything with ‘guest post’ in it gets devalued too.
Thanks to Jessica for her contribution to this post. Jessica is an SEO for Surfdome who you’ll find at the top of the SERPs’ for phrases like winter snowboard clothing and warm ski clothing.
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