Look at Zuckerberg’s latest “Awesome” upgrade to FB; video chat using Skype. Facebook needs to accept the fact that Google made a better Facebook.

Facebook became the standard by which all other social networks of the past were judged; just as MySpace was, just as Friendster was, just as AOL was.

The Future of SEO
What is a little surprising to me is just how difficult it will be in as little as two years from now to game Google the way we have in the past/present. The ONLY way to really have impact in search results will be to become a “profile marketer”.  I’ll save the profile marketer speech for later but it’s just how it sounds; somebody who promotes products without directly selling anything, (think The Joneses but online).  However, at some point, that ‘person’ needs to be vouched for by a real human in order to be an effective marketing tool…doesn’t matter how you define ‘marketing tool’.  You can still be a profile marketer but that profile will need to be ‘alive’ in a sense.  At first, even this tactic will be a waste of time.

However, when Google brings back anonymity to +1, it will be a tiny bit easier; maybe just enough of an edge to exploit it.

By anonymity for +1, I simply mean that in search results, instead of showing you the identity of the connection, (which it currently does), Google search results for +1′d content might simply state that “One of your connections liked this.”  Google search will probably also rank the results based upon a combination of the linked Web, (Pagerank as we traditionally understand it), and the social Web, (your connections).  The beauty of this model is that Google won’t need to change Pagerank much at all; Google will work to assign correct weight to your connections’ links, mentions, and musings.

Of course, links will still be valuable.  If you search for “rubber baby-buggy bumpers” but your connection network is no direct help at all, there will still be socially weighted results.  Just as your connections are weighted, the links that link connectedly mentioned pages are passed more of your personal Pagerank.  So, even though there is no direct social connection to a rubber baby-buggy bumper page, there can still be an indirect connection only a couple links away.

So, where was I?  Oh yeah, the change from tattle tale connected search results to, (user defined), anonymous results.  Google will probably add a color code to the social results instead of your photo, your comment, etc.  So if a direct connection to you +1′d a page, (and they’re privacy settings both allow Google to use their information but not display their identity), the “One of your connections liked this” text might show up green.  The strength of the connection might determine the weight of result and the shade of green.

So, if my mom +1′s a page and I she’s connected to my sisters, my aunt Debbie, my close friends Mike, Jason, Cary, or my sons…that link will be a deeper shade of green.  However, if my occasional drinking buddy +1′s something…well, he’s not connected to anybody else so his shade of green and the weight of his result is lighter.  If it’s not a direct connection, (connections of connections), then the it might show up blue or red.  Remember, these will be weighted accordingly so a connection that is light red, may never apparently effect your results.

Eventually, the socially affected results will no longer stand out as different…because they won’t be.  If I wear a hat in a crowd of people where nobody else is wearing a hat, I will likely stand out.  If, over time, people in that crowd start to wear hats then nobody will stand out.  So, we’ll either see a permanent color-coded change in the search results page; or Google will simply stop calling attention to results generated by social connects.

Personal Pagerank
We will eventually see a user controlled weighted value.  So, if I say, “Hey, I’m close to my drinking buddy and I respect his opinion more than most”; I will be able to weight his result higher than somebody else’s…or use a sliding scale…or something like that.

Google needs people to make search better because the utopian Web doesn’t exist.  There are guys like me out there trying to earn money by manipulating search results.  Google can’t audit all search results, but they can build on the work they’ve already done by adding weighted value for socially connected content.

No matter what happens, though.  From here on out, Google search is going to become personalized.  Your search results will eventually differ from my search results, always.

Why Google Plus?
The only way Google can make +1 social search work is by users adopting the change.

They learned their adoption lessons with a few flops like Google Wave, and Buzz, but Google Plus looks like the adoption vehicle they were looking for.

I want to write more but I really have a lot to do so I’ll cut it short here.

I laughed so hard that I learned.

One thing we need to be aware of in all of this is that Google’s mission is to return the best Web page for each result in order of most relevance.

In order for us to be successful in spinning, posting, commenting, linking, pinging, mentioning…anything we do to build links and reputation, it needs to fit within Google’s own expectations for a given web page that is a subset of another group.  Such as, an online store that’s just starting can easily grow by 50 pages a day for a while.  A debt settlement site that’s just starting out, maybe that can only grow a page a day for a while and then increase a bit at a time.

Here’s where the site matrix becomes important.  A site that has 4 original content articles probably won’t get 50 links a week.  But, a site that has original content articles that’s a 1000 pages deep….getting 50 links a *day* is easy for Google to accept as natural.  So that just means as long as you don’t push the link-building needle to red for a site that doesn’t fit the criteria for a site that should receive that many links, you won’t have a problem.  Push the needle too hard and you can expect your multiplier to drop; drop enough and you’ll experience the sandboxed feeling until.  But, pages are always being ranked so you’ll “magically” reappear one day when it was just a matter of you continuing to build out your site in a consistent manner.

Additionally, the farmer update was probably a matter of improving the duplicate content filter to include variables I am only able to identify conceptually.

Here’s a scenario, (if Google was a person…no commentary on whether or not that will someday happen)…Google goes out and finds all these links.  Google will base it’s ranking decision based on certain criteria, (we’ll call this ‘step 1′).  When was the domain registered? When was the last DNS change? When did certain pages get indexed.  How did the site grow?  Was it slow and steady?  Was it fast and steady?  Was it sporadic and vacillating between non-existent and fast?

Apply that same concept to links.  How many links? How often?  Always the same link text? Little variations? Unpredictable?

The way Google handles step 2 is based largely on what he/she discovers in Step 1.  If everything measured in step 1 fits within an acceptable or expected pattern for an organically growing Web site then the result will act as a multiplier for each page on the site.  If the multiplier is .75 then Google suspects the site is bit spammy but not completely overdone.  If the multiplier is 1.25 then you’ve done an above average job of organically growing your Web site or at least making it appear that way.

In Step 2 Google looks at the content surrounding the links and tries to determine if this content is valuable.  Essentially, the farmer update appears to be some sort of improvement to the duplicate content filter.  Is this spun content?  How often do certain words or phrases appear on pages that host your links?  How similar is the structure of the articles?  How varied is the length?  Now, where are these?  A page hosted on a site with a low multiplier will send low-value links.  Plus, if you have spun content with little variation in the structure of the article, regardless of the content; it still could look a little spammy.  Put the evaluation in step 1 matched up with step 2 and you can see that the farmer update will only hurt bad content but directly only impact individual Web pages and the weight the links on those pages are given.

This is an ongoing process; the ranking of pages is always happening.  Newly discovered links are instantaneously scrutinized.  Google wants to know their link-family-history and connections.  When a new link is introduced 6 levels up, it will affect all links in the chain.

How do we solve this if we’re just trying to SEO spam?  Well…we have to get better at diversifying the structures of our spyntax for one.  Next, we need to sometimes link and sometimes only mention.  When we link, we need to link the way people really link and even sometimes include our competitors in the mix, (choose somebody big like Bank of America).  We need to have a myriad of links that we can randomly draw from so that we’re passively promoting aggressively.  (meaning we’re promoting all the time but just don’t know specifically what that is…just that it has something to do whatever the subject is)  We need to build articles within articles within articles that all have such a varied structure that any article spin will generate anywhere from 200 words to 1500 words but always look completely unique as far as structure, link(or mention), anchor-text(if any), and the links themselves.  Every spin needs to read well as if a real human dripped blood, sweat, and tears into that article.  A real human or group of humans did…for sure; but just not a million different times.

I view all spyntaxed articles as living documents without a definite end-date.  Like a Web site, spyntaxed articles will continually be improved upon and will grow more indistinguishable as spun or rewritten content, (guess the second half of that isn’t a characteristic of a Web site).

Alright, there’s probably a lot I missed; but that’s the basic idea.  I have to get back to work.

Thanks,

David