Changing Trends in Search Engine Optimization

Google has emerged as the most popular search engine, and its popularity is increasing day by day. Several webmasters are working day and night in order to score higher rankings. There have been several significant changes in search engine algorithms due to which several legitimate SEO techniques have entered the “No Entry Zone” of Search engines.
During 2005-2006, article promotion was quite popular, and was used to score higher rankings on search engines. Several webmasters used to write informative article and then they tried submitting their articles to several hundred websites. Article promotion was widely accepted and a popular technique which was used to score higher rankings on search engines. However, it has started to suffer consequences of duplicate penalty . If your same article is submitted to 100 different websites, then search engines will only consider 1-2 back links from the article website where your article was submitted/crawled first time. Most of the article websites have suffered duplicate penalty due to duplicate articles which were copy-pasted from other article websites. If you are serious about Google, then you should abstain from submitting same article to several hundred article websites. If you can manage to submit 100 different/unique articles to 100 different article websites, then it will help to improve search engine rankings of your website significantly.

On the other hand link exchange technique was widely popular during 2005-2006, but since 2007, search engines have started to nullify the effectiveness of link exchange programs. However, you can still try to exchange links with niche websites. You should ensure that your link exchange partner is related to the business theme of your website.

All these changes in the past 1-2 years have started to bring out some real issues in SEO including Sandbox, Duplicate Content Issues, and some others.

Search engines are working hard to secure their ranking algorithms in order to make more profits through PPC. On the other hand SEO individuals are working day and night to understand search engines and their ranking pattern.

If you search online, you will stumble upon several hundred or even thousands of forums and blogs discussing Page Rank and other issues. However the truth is that your page rank has no relationship with the actual rankings of your website. The only benefit which page rank can give you is to help your website appear on the top positions of various web directories (which organize their links according to PR). There is even a formula on how to calculate your future Google Page Rank .

Search engines rely on a hidden parameter known as “Trust Rank”. This parameter is used to gauge the real ranking strength of any website. A website with Page Rank 2 can easily overshadow website with page rank 5 due to its hidden but higher Trust Rank. You need to concentrate on whether you need a higher page rank OR more clicks and higher search engine rankings for potential keywords (i.e your website’s actual SERPS). If you are concentrating on the latter part, then do not entangle your SEO activities geared only towards increasing page rank.

Therefore one should try to concentrate on building a naturally popular website with quality content. If your content is good enough, you will automatically gain back links which will result in higher rankings.

Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving technology, and you should always abstain from artificial techniques in order to score higher rankings. Search engines are working hard to secure their ranking algorithm. They do not want anybody to abuse the effectiveness of their search engine algorithm which is programmed to present the most relevant content pertaining to any searched keyword by its search users.