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Shifts in Standards for SEO

Search engines have been utilized worldwide to find webpage content. Objectively, one of the most popular search engines is Google. In order to provide users the best experience when looking for specific content, Google used to publicly use an algorithm called PageRank to provide pages that held the most importance. We talked about how PageRank works in class, but in short, PageRank determines the relevance of a search entry by taking into account the subjective authority of the entry. Authority is computed by inspecting the quality and quantity of links pointing to given content and its domain. There have been many iterations and updates over the years to this approach; however, because of the way that PageRank initially determined the authority of a page, link building and spamming were valid tactics or rather standards that took place in order to impact various webpages’ search engine optimization (SEO). 

Search engines often return a selection of the best possible responses for a given search query, and the user is able to browse amongst those options. Effectively, the standards mentioned before worked in the sense that one’s PageRank would increase, but the continuous development of various technologies (e.g. mobile phones, home consoles, or social media) signifies a need to alter the standard for SEO. For example, voice search is becoming more widely used in mobile devices or through other mediums. Consequently, this alters how search is conducted on the engines. Voice search queries vary from typical queries as they are more similar to colloquial speech. Google formerly only utilized PageRank, but they created a more detailed algorithm, dubbed “Hummingbird”, which incorporates other factors into their algorithm such as conversational search (addresses the issue just mentioned). Furthermore, another reason for this is that search engines will have to revisit what is being given to the user – take home consoles such as Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa for example. These devices are primarily voice operated, which transforms people’s normal web experiences. Instead returning a group of results, the user most likely wants the “best” result instead because of convenience, i.e., they do not want to be searching through many options with a product that does not potentially have a physical user interface to view the results. Thus, in this instance, the relevance of the result may be more important than the authority, which reduces the values of links. 

Some suggested SEO strategies to address these changes would be to improve the overall quality of one’s site in order to improve the relevance of the site. Factors that go into improving the quality of the site would be content, speed/performance, mobile-responsive, and promoting the page in an effective manner. However, despite all of this, the fact remains that from a practical view, link building is still effective because new technologies haven’t completely revolutionized search, they have only introduced new elements into our pre-existing standards.

Articles/Sources:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2017/08/03/how-long-will-links-be-the-gold-standard-for-seo/2/#6b3fb6be4c08 

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/are-you-optimized-for-voice-search-heres-how-to-do-it/179562/ 

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/voice-search-strategy/200120/

https://searchengineland.com/stop-oversimplifying-everything-275439

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