As we kick off 2009 it seems we are already in the midst of some serious noise in the search industry.  At the end of 08 we were hit pretty hard with talk of drastic changes to search in 09, and sadly a lot of this talk has carried over into the New Year.  A few of the popular opinions that seem to still have quite a bit of steam as we move into 2009 are “rankings are dead”, if you don’t have videos or images on your site your rankings will tank, and bounce rates will be the next big ranking factor.

Rankings Are Dead

The “rankings are dead” idea stemmed from a video interview with Bruce Clay during PubCon where he claimed that rankings would become a thing of the past with advancements in personalization and universal search in 2009.  He explained how SEO’s will need to measure success not by a site’s ranking, but things like analytics and conversions.

This same interview introduces us to the idea that sites that aren’t featuring images and video could disappear from Google’s top ten rankings overnight.  His thought is that Google will be looking for more engaging sites and content and images and video will provide the kind of engagement they are looking for.  If your site doesn’t have these items of interest, your top ten ranking site will drop overnight.

Sadly as we start out the New Year it seems that the two point’s people seemed to take away from this interview and continue to rehash is that rankings don’t matter and if you don’t get video on your site soon your rankings will tank.  First of all, if you subscribe to the school that rankings no longer matter, what do you care if your site tanks?

That aside, I think there is something more important to take away from Bruce’s interview when considering your strategy for 09.  First be more aware of what’s happening with your sites outside of just rankings.  Are they converting?  Are people finding what they are looking for on your sites?  How is your marketing strategy working as a collective?  These are the things that will really define success in your SEO strategy.

To Bruce’s second point, personalization and universal search will most definitely evolve in the coming year and as SEO’s we need to evolve with them.  While in my opinion a site probably won’t drop off the face of Google for not having video, it could definitely be outranked by a video, image, news result, or more in the SERPs.  So optimizing your site as well as your images, videos, and press releases if you have them, will definitely be an important factor to help your site and it’s presence in the SERPs.  While the idea of being outranked by something in universal search isn’t a new concept, it’s definitely something that isn’t going anywhere and if you aren’t doing your part you’ll be left in the dust in the long run.

Bounce On Outta Here

Finally bounce rates as the next big ranking factor…This concept has been around for a while, but it seemed to pick up steam at the beginning of December with a post on Search Engine Land.  Then again the concept was regurgitated in David Leonhardt’s Bounce Rate SEO Fallacies post.

UPDATE: David Harry advised me that the bounce rate fiasco actually first surfaced in October on Search Engine Watch.  I wasn’t aware of this post, but thought I’d make note of it for reference.

The idea of this is ludicrous to me and I’m glad that Matt Cutts chimed in and gave his two cents on the matter in a comment on Sphinn following David’s post.  I wish more SEO’s would let go of this and realize what a noisy signal this would be.  If bounce rates had a significant impact on search rankings I could spend my day clicking on and off of my competition until my clients’ site was #1.  Yet even after Mr. Cutts slapped down the idea people still seem to be running with it.

Let’s spend 09 focusing on more signal and less noise.  If we’re going to be innovative and find new potential in search marketing and discover more about search engines we need to be thinking logically and not jumping on the first new concept that comes from an authority.  That’s not to say that good things can’t come from authority and that’s not to say that you can have a different take away from what is being said, but sometimes it’s still a good idea to step back and question it instead of accepting it immediately as gospel.

Having not participated in the first Google Webmaster group chat I really didn’t know what to expect when I signed up for today’s session. A few of my colleagues at the office had participated in the first chat earlier this year, and felt it was quite beneficial so I decided this time to give it a try.

The sign up and sign in process were painless, but unfortunately Google had some troubles starting the session. After about ten or fifteen minutes of listening to what sounded like Darth Vader raping a cat over the phone, the session began.

Today’s session consisted of three main topics. John Mueller talked about Personalize Search, Maile Ohye discussed case sensitivity in the robots.txt file, and Jonathan Simon talked about how to remove indexed content from Google. The presentations were solid, but as a search marketer there really wasn’t too much take away from the 3 presentations. Perhaps the most useful and sometimes amusing information came from the Q&A section. With that said I have decided to outline the good and the bad from todays event.

The Good

• Maile clarified that the way you present your data in the robots.txt file can make or break your site. The directories and filenames in the robots.txt file ARE case sensitive. By not paying attention to case sensitivity you risk duplicate content problems because as Google crawls your site it will see pageA.html and PAGEA.HTML as two different pages hosting the same content. I figured this might be a useful tidbit since the room was split in the poll 111-70 as to whether or not case sensitivity matters.
• It was clarified that new websites are being crawled by the spiders usually within a week of existance, however linking can speed this up. Also mentioned was that Google’s index is refreshing about once a month.
• The .com vs .everything else conspiracy was cleared up. Matt Cutts explained that .edu’s and .gov’s do not actually pass on any more authority than other domains. Also, .info domains have not be devalued as a lesser domain. Essentially Google says all TLD’s shall be created equal.
• PR plays a critical role in how often your site is crawled. They went on to say that some news sites are crawled every 2 minutes by the search engine spiders.
• Matt Cutts gave the “official” word on whether or not Google thinks that SEO has a future, and the answer is, “Certainly, as long as the SEO is whitehat.”

Here are some of the Questions and answers that stood out that I felt offered some good information or at least piqued the interest of the panelists:

Q: Hi Matt, Are there any guidelines available on keyword density we have pages that are about 1 single subject and the keyword density is quite high

Matt Cutts – 2:27 pm

A: Antony, you may not believe this, but we tend not to think much about KW density here at Google, b/c our algorithms handle it pretty well. My advice is to pull in an innocent/non-search friend and have them read the text. If they raise their eyebrow, …

Q: Does google differentiate between searches in lower case and searches with proper capitalization?

John Mueller – 2:28 pm

A: We may take this into account if we can recognize that it is relevant to the query.

Q: Will Google consider giving any incentive to webmasters/users who helps google to fight spam? Maybe some sort of point based system would be interesting..This will certainly motivate all the webmasters to come forward and help google to Keep Spam out..

Matt Cutts – 2:30 pm

A: Saad, I do like that suggestion a lot. Something for us to think about.

Q: Does Google support or plan to support hCard microformats?

John Mueller – 2:42 pm

A: I’m not aware of changes in that regard, but we are always open to new ideas!

Q: Why don’t you include actual search numbers in trends or kw selector tool?

Matt Cutts – 2:52 pm

A: I think we’re worried that some people could scrape or abuse that information. Personally I think it would be cool to offer better/more numbers or stats though. We’ll think about ways that we could offer crunchier numbers to people.

The Bad:

Here are some of the Q&A follies for your enjoyment.

Q: whats matts cats name?
A: I have two cats. One is Emmy (she’s a scaredy cat) and the other one is Ozzie. He’s a handful.

Q: I’ve got 3 cats,.. cindy, caty and penelopy..
A: cute

Q: Matt, I was going to ask you about your cat – I’ve got two Persians – is that cat grooming tool you posted on your blog as good as you make out?!
A: Pete, I wouldn’t recommend the tool unless I thought it was really good. I think it would work well for Persian cats, esp. because they have very long hair.

Q: Hi Matt! It’s me Zafar
A: Howdy!

Q: I just want to know since I am not breaking any rules anymore, is there a chance that I can expect a increase in my PR again? or would Google ignore it in the next update?I am not really a PR fan, btw.
A: Zafar, a reconsideration request would be the best place to do that.

Q: Mariya, I’m in Brazil and listening to the conversation via my cell phone – who’s paying for this international call???
A: Hi Wall-E, WebEx provides toll-free numbers for most countries. I hope you dialled the toll-free number and not the regular number (-:

Q: what does googlebot like?
A: milk and cookies!

Q: spam?
A: no thanks

Q: IS there a problem with URLs that end in .0 like example.com/seo2.0
A: I think this has been resolved.

Q: is position SIX a penalty?
A: Position 6 is always between 5 & 7. One site has to be at #6.

Q: Has Maile been on the Cranberry and Vodka yet today?!
A: Maile looks sober to me, Pete.

The unfortunate part of the Q&A was that a lot of the time was spent answering bogus bonehead questions that basically just wasted the time of the panelists. There is no such thing as a stupid question, but there is such thing as the proper time to ask a question. If you want to talk to Matt Cutts about his cat, see if you can catch up with him at a conference about it. Don’t waste the time of over 400 other people!

Sadly my question wasn’t answered.  I asked, “Is there a rule of thumb to consider when thinking about PR vs the number of links on a page and how many of those links will get some of the link juice passed on?”  This inspired by last Friday’s White Board Friday where Rand discussed how many links you should max out on based on it’s PR.  As a follow up I mentioned in the survey sent out by Google that they should answer the remaining questions in a blog post or group so that everyone gets a chance.  Obviously they could weed out any duplicates to shorten the list.

In conclusion I would say that the chat was a success and thanks to the Q&A actually offered some good information for SEM’s. Google announced that they intend to do more of these based on the success of the first two, and hope to hold them on a quarterly basis.  I hope they do.  While I didn’t feel this one was that informative, it definately has some great potential.

If you’re like me then you probably jumped on the Plurk bandwagon last week and have spent countless hours wasting the day away in hopes that it will eventually provide you with the same kind of gratification that Twitter gives me when searching for industry news and updates. Sadly the Plurk universe has failed to deliver that same gratification I have come to love with Twitter. Though there are still those few updates here and there that hold some industry relevance; I find that the majority of the information on Plurk is made up of random musings and life updates.

Following some office politics that damn near shutdown much of our Twitter and Plurk use last week, a number of my colleagues and I discussed the differences between the two services and the potential that Plurk holds over Twitter if it takes off for SEO/SEM’s new and old.

Perhaps the most intriguing argument I heard, in favor of Plurk, came from Kristina Sanchez. She had mentioned how many of the updates on Plurk quickly turn into something that simulates a group IM or chat room. She brought up how this would provide a great opportunity for SEO/SEM’s to communicate as a group and share ideas. People from all walks of life, backgrounds, and industries can easily chime in on the topic at hand, and respond to something on your timeline even if the update or subject matter did not originally involve them.

This concept really got me thinking. Imagine if some of the key players in SEO/SEM were as active on Plurk as they are on Twitter. That would open an incredible opportunity for those in the SEO/SEM industry to interact and bounce ideas off of one another. SEO/SEM’s could easily interact and comment on each other’s posts in an environment that often feels like a chat room. And because Plurk groups responses with the original plurk people can follow the updates with ease. Often on Twitter you will see an update and a handful of responses from people, but you don’t always get the whole conversation and a lot of time the update is overlooked completely.

As of right now I still see Twitter has done a great job at providing people with a means of finding out what is going on with the industry and those involved. But Plurk opens the door for a whole world of opportunity. A way for the industry to openly and easily communicate what is going on in the industry and the chance to bounce ideas off one another or ask questions in a real time environment. Twitter provides an opportunity for similar interaction, but not in a community format like Plurk. I still feel Plurk is a huge time waster with a poor UI, but there is clearly a great opportunity that if taken advantage of, could make a huge difference in the SEO/SEM industry.