Susarla.com

Pubcon Sketchnotes

This year pubcon’s center of discussion was Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, a new search engine algorithm that was launched few months back.  With the launch of this algorithm google is redefining the search space and taking it to a new level. In broad stokes these are the areas that google is focusing:

• Knowledge Graph: Things not strings. Knowing what’s really behind a query.
• Voice Search: Getting better and better
• Conversational Search: Think pronouns, dereference the pronouns by maintaining an episodic memory during a conversational session
• Google Now: looking steps ahead where people may not even be querying
• Deep learning: Thousands of computers being used to learn neural networks

More about hummingbird – Core quality changes:

• Hummingbird: If you’re doing a query, it might be a natural language query, and it might include words you don’t need. “What is the capital of everlovin’ Texas?” Hummingbird is a step in the direction to figure out the words that matter more and give those words more intelligent scoring. There’s a lot being written about Hummingbird and the fact is it doesn’t affect SEO. It makes the results of long-tail and specific queries much better.
• Panda softening: There are always those grey-zone sites in Panda’s targets and some new signals they’ve added are meant to ease up on those sites.
• Detecting/boosting authorities: If you’re a topical authority, keep deepening that content.
• Smartphone ranking: If a searcher has a phone that doesn’t do Flash, Google is less likely to deliver results with Flash

Future trends of search include:

• Machine learning: Google will keep trying to figure out how to add more value to searchers
• Mobile: In 2011, YouTube had 6% of traffic from mobile phones. In 2012 it was 25% and in 2014 mobile is expected to be 40% of YouTube’s traffic. If you haven’t figured out your strategy for mobile, you better be thinking about it.
• Social/identity/authorship: Knowing who you are and identity can make a big difference. It’s a long-term signal that you’re a person people listen to.

Treat search engine as another person if you show authority and ownership of content people will listen and so will search engine. –

Content optimization trends for future

• Social Content: This plays front and center of search engine indexing. Increase in crowd sourced content publication and generation. Be Consistent, Be Interesting and Be Authentic.
• Social Sharing: Organically grown social sharing is a huge indicator of authentication indicator.
• Visual web: Web content media type will continue to increase from a text based to a more picture and video content.