Ranking is Dead,Traffic is All that Matters

Monday, November 17, 2008



Every webmaster wants to see the future of SEO. What if you have the power to see the future and sees that in the next few months ranking would be dead and all that would matter is traffic? Probably you will change your SEO habits and start on something that would keep you in the race. The future of SEO depends on how search engines evolve into more modern ranking methods. Bruce Clay, president of Bruce Clay, Inc. revealed in a one-on-one interview with WebProNews' Michael McDonald some insights about the future of SEO. Bruce talked about many things, one of those is "behavior based search", which means that personalization is going to be "web-wide" using third party cookies and things. Bruce says that your prior search history will affect your search. This means that if 100 people will do a search at the same time for the same term, the result each one will get would be unique because their prior search history affected their search. Bruce gave an illustration, an example search term: "java". Some people doing the searh may be looking for something related to programming and others are looking for the beverage and another group may be looking for the tourist destination. Theoritecally the search engine will know that and will provide each user tha appropriate list of search results. "We can't search for any term and look at rankings because I can get different results than you for exactly the same query. So that's going to change a lot," Bruce says. It doesn't matter if you're logged into Google or not. Bruce believes that personalized results will be coming out within the first quarter of next year.

How about "intent-based search"? Your search engine is looking up your IP and revises your search result based on where you are and your search engine can make assumptions about the intent of your search and give you the most appropriate result of your search. "The page that ranks for a shopping query is an entirely different architecture than the page that ranks for a research query," Bruce explains,

Bruce Clay believes that in the first six months of 2009, we will be seeing a lot more implementation of behavior and intent-based search leading to a mindset of "ranking is dead, and traffic is all that matters."

Bruce suggested that SEO’s should focus closely on analytics, bounce rate, traffic. He also advised SEO's to make use of video, images, audio, maps, etc in their pages. This will help engage the viewers of your page, and it will also engage Google.

So it all boils down to this : If your site has something new to show or tell, if it is unique, if it stands out in the crowd, Google will surely notice it.

Update:
To make things clearer and more complete, I have added the video of the interview of Bruce Clay. this video is courtesy of WebProNews.

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Comments

10 Responses to “Ranking is Dead,Traffic is All that Matters”
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Gem said...

If PR dies, so will all those text link selling and paid reviews.

They had to do this fast, or SU and Digg will soon win the race and put those search engines behind.

November 17, 2008 at 9:08 PM
Pastilan said...

PR will not actually die but the way pages are ranked now would not be the same as they would be in the next few months. The way we see PR now would not be the same tomorrow, so in a sense ranking will "die" because people will not have the same results for the same query because the results would be affected by their search history. If one page gets a high ranking for one searcher, it would not mean that it will get the same rank in another user's search. This is good for searchers and Google because it means that search results would be more accurate. This is not exactly good news to webmasters and SEOs because it means a new challenge, a new thing to learn. It is like starting from the beginning again after learning a lot because what you have learned has died, has become obsolete.

I could not see the connection between the "death" of ranking and "death" of paid reviews.

November 17, 2008 at 10:11 PM
Calv said...

if you search for the term "java" referring to the beverage, even if a java programming site has a PR of 10, it still won't be visited. so having a high PR won't help you in that matter. just focus on the correct keywords and you won't be affected by this one.

November 17, 2008 at 10:27 PM
Umma said...

I still believe writing the correct keywords will put you on top in terms of seach engines from google or yahoo etc.

November 18, 2008 at 12:41 PM
Anonymous said...

shhhh!
PR still sells ad space :D

November 18, 2008 at 6:29 PM
Kigwa said...

@Umma, I agree with you :)

@nukeit, yes PR sells ad space and other spaces available in a page :) My PR3 blog has fetched me around $100 this week for some posts (and that blog does not even get to the 50 hits average per week).

November 18, 2008 at 7:59 PM
pchi said...

hmmmm

yeah I agree to some extent

technology is always evolving especially depende sa observation of experts

wow! you earned $100 in a week? hehe. galing ah.

November 20, 2008 at 8:47 AM
Pastilan said...

@Pchi

Tsamba lang yun, di ko pa na-eearn pero naka pila na ang opps from blogvertise tig $10, aabot na ng $100. di nga ako makapaniwala na ina-assign nila ng maraming opps yung isang blog ko eh. iba kasi sa blogvertise, submit mo lang yung blog mo (nagsubmit ako ng limang blog) tapos open mo lang account mo every now and then tapos meron ka nang opps, wala nang bidding or whatever, you just wait. This month lang ako nagsimula doon, ang dami kong opps pero doon lahat nag tambak sa PR3 ko na blog. Kung tingnan mo yung blog na yun halos every other post opp yun galing sa kanila tapos tig $10 talaga bawat isa. Five day mo gagawin isang opp so masarap sya kasi relaxed ka di tulad sa PPP at SS na very short ang time.

November 20, 2008 at 5:15 PM
 
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