Google continues to make the life of your average SEO very frustrating. With their Panda and Penguin updates, SEOs all over the world are constantly in a heightened state of anxiety wondering if and when their sites will be hit. Many black hat SEO companies who dish out spam all day long have seen their sites and their customers sites get hammered time and time again. Even white hat companies nervously wait for every forthcoming update from the big G.
Every SEO and would be online marketer has used the line “links no longer work!” Whenever I see that assertion I just know that a new and exciting “SEO” product is on offer.
With over 500 algorithm updates every year, some of them major (Panda is refreshed every 20 days, Penguin every 6 moths or so) so wonder SEO’s are wary about the future.
Web 3.0 is also known as the “semantic web” and has been talked about for more than a decade. There’s no doubt that search is changing and the semantic web, in many respects, is already with us.
What is the semantic web?
This is explanation is from Charles Silver, CEO of the Algebraix Data Corp
“The Semantic Web is about connecting data, all data, everywhere and putting it in massive graph databases that can be read and conceptually understood by computers. Currently, most Web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. But because linked, graph-based data is machine-readable, computers will be able to answer increasingly sophisticated questions for us — to interpret data, understand context, infer meaning and do reasoning. Put another way: Semantic databases, which sprang out of Artificial Intelligence, allow computers to “think,” to understand big, conceptual queries, then find and combine exactly the information we humans need to make ever-smarter decisions. Yes, just like the Star Trek computer did”
Read more about the semantic web (Web 3.0) from Charles Silver here; http://sandhill.com/article/why-web-3-0-the-semantic-web-will-be-even-more-disruptive-than-web-1-0/
As an SEO who has always created great content and who always built relevant links, the various Google updates didn’t really hurt me. As a juxtapose to the sky is falling brand of SEOs, many of my client’s sites actually increased in rank. I see the supposed web 3.0 as a great way to improve user experience, which is what Google cares the most about. Google can not thrive as the best and most popular search engine if their algorithm delivers junk sites or a useless ezinearticles.com article when the searcher is truly on a mission to access great information and solutions to their problem.
My thinking is this; white hat and squeaky clean SEO companies will thrive in any environment. I think it is going to be a great time to be a marketer and the people who do great work, who write great content and who can create relationships will do well. I see web 3.0 as a much needed boost to how we use search engines.
In many ways, web 3.0 is the current form of linking that Google would prefer to see! Relevant links, relevant keywords, varied keywords that all ties together. I suppose if you do black hat junk content and spammy link building then this would scare you but the rest of us are looking forward to this. In many ways, we’re already doing most of this for my clients because I see myself as a marketer first and a SEO second. I see my role as educating clients to think beyond where they are on Google and focus on getting traffic from a multitude of other sources and then convert that traffic into happy customers.
As you can see the world is getting smaller. Web 3.0 or whatever else it might be called is a welcomed and much needed change that will shake up the SEO industry in a positive way. I think that it will be great for businesses, end users and SEO companies. And you’ll start to see more an more SEO agencies talking about semantic web optimisation services! By the way we got in early and started to optimise “semantic web optimisation” all around Australia. It will be interesting to see whether this term will become more highly searched and become a “money” keyword.
If you’re concerned about how changes to web and search will affect your business call Andrew Riedel on 1300 885 487.