Search Engine Marketing has always been an industry that has faced many challenges that are different each year, requiring a careful eye and a wealth of knowledge to help create success for many different types of organisations within the search engines. With 2011 bringing many new algorithm changes, particularly for Google, that have affected millions of websites and how SEO’s plan and carry out each and every campaign.
2011 Algorithm Recap
Each and every year it is well known that there are around 400 to 500 algorithmic changes with several being publicised. And 2011 was no exception, there were many big announcements that made the news such as the introduction of the +1 button that launched in March. The +1 button created a social element to the search engine results page (SERPs), that had a direct influence of the results of organic and paid search of every user that has a large amount of members in their Google+ circles. As expected the social icons have now become apparent and as standard on many websites that promote sharing to other well known social websites such as Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon.
Another area of the algorithm that gathered a lot of attention was Panda updates that finished with Panda update 3.1, by late November. The initial update involved the rolling out of Panda to all English queries worldwide. Along with many other new signals. Further updates involved many minor changes that lead to the international roll out of Panda for both English and non-English queries, mid-August.
Surprisingly, mid-June support for schema.org was announced by all major search engines. With the goal of creating support for structured data, among all of the search engines.
But, the biggest news story of the year was no doubt the announcement of encrypted search that supports SSL. It was made clear that many search queries would become encrypted. Therefore, anyone signed into their Google account will have all their search queries encrypted and any site visited through Google SERPs will no longer be able to access ‘referrer’ data, such as search terms. With a percentage as little as 5% of searches this would account for was given. But many found it to be much greater as the days went on.
2012 Algorithm Predictions
There are many different areas that could become targeted throughout the duration of 2012. But one of the most increasing markets is no doubt mobile. With mobile search rising at a staggering rate there will no doubt be major changes ahead, along with social playing a large role as it did throughout 2011. With Google+ still growing month on month it will no doubt begin to challenge Facebook and Twitter as the year progresses but to what extent no-one knows.
Speculation has arrived at the possibility of Google merging different services such as either replacing or combining Google Places and each companies Google+ page. Much similar for Google places becoming combined with Google+. With over 62 million users and a predicted 400 millions users by the end of 2012, this is half of current Facebook followers and only took one and a half years compared to Facebook’s eight. Therefore there is more than enough understanding as to the reason for doing so.
As mentioned above, Google’s encrypted search is believed to rise from more than the originally given figure of 5% up to 30%. This will be directly correlated to mobile search that will rise throughout 2012. But kn-one can be sure and only time will tell.
No-one knows what that the future holds for search engine optimisation (SEO) but 2011 was an important year for all in the SEO industry and 2012 looks even more exciting, with the star no doubt being mobile search.
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