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RSSContent is SO 2006, as far as search engine optimization goes.
Everywhere I turn, the SEO discussions center on linking and link development. The appreciation of the value for inbound links to a marketer or publisher’s site is one of the reasons why there’s such corporate excitement over blogs and blogger relations, user-generated content, and tagging.
Instead of just extolling the value of links, I started to wonder what would happen if links weren’t so highly valued. Imagine if, in this “Twilight Zone” exercise, you woke up one day to find that the major search engines no longer used inbound links as a way to rank Web sites or other types of online content. The effect would be calamitous, on par with the Department of Treasury one day saying that greenbacks would no longer be valued as currency.
To see just how much the value of the link has appreciated, below are some of the ramifications of what would happen if links no longer mattered for search optimization:
Content would really become king. Keyword density, the imperfect science of including just enough of the most important keywords on any given page without spamming the search engines, becomes more important than ever. Title tags and other meta data rise in prominence so that no well-ranked site for any query that matters has the word “welcome” or “homepage” in it. Copywriters’ salaries skyrocket.
Anchor text, the text coded as a link, becomes mostly generic, as this too no longer needs to be optimized. Phrases like “buy now” and “click here” serve as the standard anchor text, as opposed to text that clearly dictates the link’s value proposition.
Google-Bombing, where a large number of sites link to one site with specific anchor text to influence search results, doesn’t exist.
Sitemaps -- namely the consumer-facing version that help search engine spiders crawl a site -- continue to serve their purpose. Despite the link value being negligible, they remain a useful way to offer content to the engines.
Press releases stop including links back to the originating company’s site since it isn’t worth the trouble, even though reporters and others reading the releases grew to like the linking. The social media release and its cousin, the social media press release, die in their infancy.
Social media becomes much more about self-expression rather than connecting with others. The motivation for forming communities, planned or ad hoc, falls off precipitously with no added incentive to link to others.
Blog adoption by corporations and business professionals gradually increases as a way to create content and communicate and solicit consumer feedback, but readership is difficult to build and sustain without blogs’ prominence in search engine results.
Tags exist as a way to classify content, but they’re not promoted by marketers or publishers, as the content is just as easily classified under a hierarchical taxonomy. Many publishers thus stick with the top-down approach.
Digg, which gained prominence as a way to rank news stories, is bought by a major search engine after its technology is improved to prevent gaming the system. With links unimportant, this becomes the only way for other users to influence a site’s search rankings. The sport of manipulating results this way becomes far more widespread than Google-bombing ever was.
Wikis are used for developing content-rich encyclopedias on every topic imaginable. As image and video search improve, “photowikis” and “videowikis” also become wildly popular for publishers and marketers, and online museums spring up as a way to organize multimedia content. Wikipedia remains well-ranked for its content, but for subjects with little information available, it’s nowhere to be found in natural results.
Much of this feels like a bad dream, and we’re fortunate that this is all science fiction. While search engines can at any given time change the value of inbound links in their algorithms for organic search rankings, and publishers can also add a “nofollow” tag for links they wish to devalue (read a treatise on those tags from Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal), the humble link keeps expanding its empire, spanning search engines and social media. Long live the link.
RSS FEEDS
One saving grace is that most data these days is separated from the design of the site. If the rules change dramatically, the skilled website maker can output the site using different methods that accommodate for however things change. It's like separation of concerns in normal programming. Just because your site is constructed one way, doesn't mean you can't install a different presentation layer and have it constructed a different way that appeals more to the algorithms of the day.
The words "isn't worth the trouble" sound out of place to me. Granted a lot of links nowadays are included for link building purposes, since SEs give them so much weight. But I cannot imagine these not being included in press releases and such in the event of SEs reducing links' weight. What about just giving the reader's easy access to the business/website being dicussed? There's more to linking than just pure SEO value. The act of simply pointing people to a relevant website/product shouldn't be forgotten.
Inbound links are gradually eroding in value. This is a really big discussion and I'll try to stay focused on SEO tactics rather than the bigger context of advertising (PPC models, click fraud, etc.), marketing (landing pages, conversion funnels, ROI, etc.) and the way new technologies (Rich media, enhanced partner publishing with RSS) might undermine the current weighting of inbound links.
I think that the value of inbound links may be overrated - especially for Google compared to the other major search engines.
Perhaps I should say it this way-- inbound links are the foundation of the Google algorithm and gaining a strong enduring pattern of inbound links is a necessary condition for success (top organic results on first two pages of search results) but inbound links are not a sufficient condition. An extra ingredient (or set of conditions) is needed. This set of conditions is the internal structure of words and meaning within a single page, all pages on a single domain and the internal structure of pages linking to the target page. I'm not saying much new here.
The corporate excitement over blogs might be partly due to grasping (getting it) the importance of gathering many inbound links in an easy and efficient process. I would put emphasis on the internal structure (semantic and not just statistical) of words, phrases and -yes- even paragraph length blocks of text. The tagging adds something but its a surface feature and motivational part of the process of getting people to read and link to a blog post. Tagging might act to guide good SEO copywriting but I doubt its used much in this tactical sense.
Inbound links have already lost their status - they point but they don't have punch.
The interesting question is: Will the basic foundation of the page rank model - so well presented by Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer in their 2006 book "Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings" - undergo a radical jump in evolution? It just might in the next five years.
I am hesitant to use the phrases "social search" and "personalized search results" because they are used in such widely different ways. Most of the social search models, social media, and social networking sites and portals are knock offs of each other. This current crop will not seriously alter the page rank model and the role of inbound links.
There is a variant of social search that might change things significantly - it goes something like this - vertical market sites and communities of interest begin using easy to use tools (even games - its already being done) that categorize content. These tools develop a sufficient user base and analytic power to re-orient the basic model of page rank. The page rank model shifts from **links across document sets** to **feature extraction of objects and the affordances of objects**. OK that last sentence would take a while to explain ;) One specific working example is http://www.peekaboom.org
So this is already happening - the research literature shows the traces, the infrastructure of Web 2.0 tools and gaming set the stage and motivation for the easy aggregation of information and models of sensation-action that displace the significance of inbound links. A stopping point along the way may be models of how people reason by analogy.
I doubt we will wake up some morning and see page rank (and inbound links) have been tossed aside. Maybe it will be gradual and subtle. I am pretty sure though that page rank will give way to search algorithms based on how the senses work and how we get feedback from simple actions in the world.
I am making the assumption that social search combines human judgment and algorithmic search and that this scales from small communities of interest to open search on the wide wide web. Most serious discussion of social search now looks at it as a blend of human and algorithmic strengths.
Good copywriters and SEO planners do this now with raw intuition. They place emphasis on internal structure and intuit contexts of use. Well its a good topic and I hope you continue the discussion - it makes this line of work interesting and fun.