SEO Experts Facing Extinction?

I tweeted about an interesting subject earlier today: Google Caffeine. Google Caffeine is an exercise by Google to improve search results. It’s actually gone live in one Google data centre and it’s going to be rolled out across the rest of us in due course.

The important point is that this appears to be a radical behind the scenes overhaul of the Google search engine. That means if there is a change to the way sites and phrases are indexed it’s likely that your rating is going to change. Either in a good way or in a bad way…

And it all depends on whether you had the foresight, or luck,  to use SEO methods that still allows you to rank well in Google.

What’s Google Changed?

Several people have pointed to some changes in the results and concluded that:

1) There appears to be an increase in the weight given to the domain name
2) Similarly increased weight to tags in Technorati and other key sites
3) Maybe a slight lessening of the important of video

And I suspect there’s also an increase in the importance of Twitter data to compound the issue further.

Comparing The ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Google

I discovered an enterprising SEO person had created a tool to compare the results between “Old Google” and this “New Google.”

When I tried the Google Compare Tool out on my own name: “Jim Symcox” I discovered the newer Google found 24,10 results compared to 6,810 for the older one.

So something has definitely happened…

And if you read the forums and articles on the web there are quite a few SEO specialists who are worried that they will lose the ability to manipulate the search results for their client sites because the key domains will simply be bought out by big business. After all if you’re a one man band and you’re offered 100,000 for a domain you’re hardly likely to say no, are you?

What Happens To The SEO Experts?

That means the big players will dominate the Google top positions and that leaves SEO experts unable to make much of a dent for their clients.

You can see why they’d be worried. I mean would you employ someone who gets no appreciable results for you?

So the SEO expert may be facing extinction, however that leaves the humble web site owner without any real ammunition against the bigger players. It could be an interesting few months as Google rolls this out across all its data centres.

Of course it might mean that we need to employ different methods for improving search positions, or even use only the current “white hat” ones.

Good luck to you! Personally, I hope that Business Growth Powerpack manages to cling on to it’s positions in Google. Time will tell!