What has changed in SEO in the last 12 months

We’ve been debating in the office recently about what has actually changed in SEO over the last 12 months. We came up with a variety of answers to this, but in the end, it mostly boils down to just 1 thing – it’s got harder, because far more people are doing it.

There have of course been other changes in SEO over the last 12 month. Google’s dominant market position has been growing stronger, particularly in the UK. Instead of lots of large changes to how sites are ranked, having massive changes to ranking results, there are now lots of incremental refinements to all the search engines algorithms, which has led to a phenomenom commonly referred to as everflux. Whilst this isn’t new to the last 12 months, we have been observing hourly flux on some competitive terms, which is something that has only really been happening in the last 6 months or so.

Blogs have been growing ever more powerful, as Google’s appetite for fresh content is insatiable, and blogs are an incredibly powerful mechanism to serve this content to them, without the spiders having to search for it.

Just over a year ago, Google dropped the supplemental index from public view, although I have written a blog recently about how the effects of the supplemental index are still in use on some sites or pages with authority issues.

Personalised search has continued to grow, and you can now manage your own search results with the Google SearchWiki. It remains to be seen how this will impact on “normal” rankings for phrases – and there have been comments made that lots of people removing a listing could have the same effect with the “normal” listings

Related Posts

1. Supplemental Results In Google?
2. What is the Supplemental Index?
3. Supplemental Results No Longer Flagged By Google
4. Does the Supplemental Index still exist but in another form?
5. How to get out of the Supplemental Index
6. No Results in Google due to Sandbox or Supplemental
7. More on the Supplemental Index
8. Yahoo turns 14 – how times have changed in search engine optimisation

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