2015 - emerging trends on search, what are you predicting?

[Whitey]

Here's some things/questions happening recently that I saw :

- Matt Cutt's may have left his previous Google role for good [ is there such a need for a role on outreach with the new algo's ]... what's the signal ?
- Duane Forrester made redundant at Bing [ ditto , following Google ]
- Panda quality algo seems resolute and relatively unforgiving
- Penguin was certainly resolute and hasn't forgiven anyone en-masse
- Mobile growing exponentially at the expense of desktop search
- More competitive platforms strengthening to be seen on e.g. Social / Facebook , Pinterest , Instagram
- Will search engines alone matter as much in the grander scheme of things
- Smarter SEO ?

What search engine trends are you seeing, what does it tell us, and how will your competitors embrace the changes in 2015 .... / thoughts ?

[netmeg]

That's true of any business, online or offline.

We find we can beat out Amazon for some products, because while Amazon is an authority in sales, we're an authority on the products. The tire kickers are going to go to Amazon regardless (and often pick out the wrong product for their application, because Amazon can't help there). The ones who need what Amazon can't offer come to us.

[Whitey]

A few more thoughts on 2015.....

- The hunger for targeted advertising resulting in a marketing performance of more than double will force Google to produce search results that are more sensitive to hyper-segmentation and micro targeting, for it to be a highly relevant advertising platform ( yes search is their main platform ) .

Currently lot's of folks use alternative websites and leave a lot of data on them , like Twitter and Facebook acting as better repositories of data for audience data. Advertisers need and will want access to these types of pages or search results to use targeted ads more effectively than ever.

- the % of people connected digitally over 12 hours per day will more than double ( crystal ball prediction ) with the better use of mobile and wearable technology. Search will not occupy as large a proportion of the market, as it did before, as SEO's struggle to provide diversity of content that caters for this need. ( Challenge here folks ! )

- Google executives will become more frustrated in 2015 that the Mom and Pop / low quality sites they killed with Panda and Penguin en-masse did not cause a reaction en-masse of rich and diverse websites built out of new and exciting content and ideas. ( That killed democracy on the web ! - no Google bashers need to respond to this - please, let's keep this thread positive. Cough. ).

- Google executives will be cringing as the place for exciting and en-masse UGC content and opinionated referrals moves to platforms where real living people matter, like Facebook and LinkedIn, while they get stuck with major brands that already have the audience and are successfully building content independently and merging it with their own social platforms without the need for Google search. Yes I'm seeing platform's with audiences of 100M+ users building their own social platforms. ( I might be a bit out of place here - but -it's a challenge )

- Google will recognise even more in 2015 that planting search access over a top quality brand is diminishing their user retention fast, and therefore relevance.

- Facebook will emerge strategically as is a real threat to Google search dominance as a "people's" search resource merged with it's own search engine becomes more likely, as many people start to merge "knowledge" into their social communications ( They just gave Bing the flick - something's happening, maybe )

- Facebook will start preparation in 2015 to encourage business' more to put content onto their platform, and out of this strengthen a captive audience for search that can only be accessed on Facebook owned or partnered assets [ yes - their own small business / people's search engine )

- More business owners in 2015 will want users to interact with their content, by providing more relevance. This is because by providing personalized content business' in 2014 ( find me the stats ! ) were able to improve the quantity of sales, reduce the cost of operation, magnify the ROI and retain users longer on their websites. With this customer retention leads become more valuable, but Google will struggle to respond with diversity to be relevant in personalization, being a jack of all trades, master of non. I predict personalization will become more widely adopted in 2015, leading to the growth of one to one relationship marketing outside of search.

- Google will strengthen it's play on "geo-mobility" with it's hold on mapping in 2015, using this as a tool to capture relevant content on it's search platform. So whether you are on the move or planning to go somewhere, or relate something to a map, Google will move your search around you.

- Confident webmasters in 2015 will re emerge equipped with ideas that will make Google follow them, rather than they follow Google.

[Clay_More]

Absolutely. Remember, we here are not "normal" users.

We had a guest who yesterday asked if she could print out her boarding pass. As I was setting up for her to use a device, I asked if she had a browser preference.

The blank stare reinforced that fact I am not normal. If you aren't normal, realize you can accomplish things that aren't normal. It's your birthright and perhaps your duty to make things better.

[superclown2]

I wonder if 2015 will be the year when Europe starts the eventual destruction of Google. This is not just some fanciful wishful thinking.

Google's whole modus operandi is built around retaining data about visitors to web sites, including their own sites, and using this data to create targeted advertising. This just happens to be illegal in most, if not all, European countries without the express (not implied) permission of those visitors. How on earth they could reliably obtain this in every case with complete certainty is beyond me.

Regulatory authorities in a number of countries are getting very restless over this and with unease about Google's domination of search over here and concerns about Android's stranglehold on mobile devices the crunch is fast approaching.

So my prediction? Google to start a long decline as far as search is concerned, with more and more diversification into arenas which may, or may not, prove successful. Their place to be taken by Facebook, Twitter and Amazon.

Bing and Yahoo, with no new ideas about effective marketing, to decline too.

[jmccormac]

Interesting idea, Superclown2,
Google's real problems began in 2004/2005 with the widespread use of Wikipedia and Facebook. The "don't link" rubbish propagated by Google's FUD buddies has really hit Google badly and the last few years or so of this rubbish has damaged the structure of the Web. Some sites just don't link to others now. Now how does the lack of links affect a link based search engine? New sites become harder to find unless they have analytics or advertising. But here's the killer for Google: The ccTLDs. The ccTLD registries typically do not release their zone files. (They stopped in 2003. This was due to the data being scraped and used for nefarious purposes.) Thus any new ccTLD websites without IBLs that are not using some of Google's spyware are invisible to Google. Faced with this accelerating SERPs decrepitude, Google allowed the same people who caused the problem to waffle away with aspirations towards Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Graphs and other bogosity. But the problems haven't gone away. If anything, they have gotten worse in the last year.

The next year, 2015, might well see Google's position being challenged in countries where the ccTLD is the domain name of choice. The challenge may come in the form of localised web directories with search engines from which Google is banned. And these may also be highly optimised for mobile. The one major problem with running a search engine is monetisation. Now if Amazon provides some alternative to Adsense for these, as yet hypothetical, search engines, then Google could have country level competition. Bing and Yahoo have the same rotting fish problem in that they have managers rather than innovators in charge.

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

and en-masse UGC content and opinionated referrals moves to platforms where real living people matter

Surely that's an oxymoron?

I do not, and I also know many, many others who do not live their lives online nor submit copius quantities of data.

Find me, you will not:-)

[EditorialGuy]

I suspect that 2015 will be more of the same for Google (albeit with improvements. After all, why throw away a winning formula?

But what about Bing and Yahoo?

Will Bing continue to coast along in Google's shadow (even in the U.S., its main market), or will Microsoft either up its game or stop throwing good money after bad?

Will Yahoo Search continue to be a private-labeled supermarket brand of Bing results? Or might it try to do something different with its imported raw material, a la DuckDuckGo?

[EditorialGuy]

Yet something else to think about:

A while back, Yandex announced that it was no longer using links as a ranking factor in its e-commerce results for the Moscow region. Was that announcement a harbinger of where e-commerce organic search might be headed in 2015?

[superclown2]

A while back, Yandex announced that it was no longer using links as a ranking factor in its e-commerce results for the Moscow region. Was that announcement a harbinger of where e-commerce organic search might be headed in 2015

You're way out of date. I have had sites in the top 3 - 4 spots of Google SERPs for profitable search terms for at least two years - with numbers of links you could count on one hand.

They can be gamed too easily.

[EditorialGuy]

You're way out of date. I have had sites in the top 3 - 4 spots of Google SERPs for profitable search terms for at least two years - with numbers of links you could count on one hand.

Are you trying to tell us that, like Yandex in the Moscow region, Google has removed links as a ranking factor altogether for e-commerce queries? If so, that's news to most of us.

[lucy24]

The ccTLD registries typically do not release their zone files.

It's a country-level thing? I thought it was ARIN vs. the rest of the world :( I'm particularly thinking of .ca --mainly because it's the only one you ever see on, ahem, legitimate* sites.


* I've got an .ag bookmarked, but I cannot call it "legitimate".

[RedBar]

Google has removed links as a ranking factor altogether for e-commerce queries? If so, that's news to most of us.

I have been querying this myself since I've read this on several reputable sites recently but none had any definite qualification for it.

Anyone?

[superclown2]

Are you trying to tell us that, like Yandex in the Moscow region, Google has removed links as a ranking factor altogether for e-commerce queries? If so, that's news to most of us.

Did I say that? Read the post again.

Links are a factor. At the moment. One of many. In the future I reckon they will become less important still as others come into play.

[jmccormac]

It's a country-level thing? I thought it was ARIN vs. the rest of the world :( I'm particularly thinking of .ca --mainly because it's the only one you ever see on, ahem, legitimate* sites.

No it is commonplace with many ccTLDs. Back in 2002/2003, the ccTLD WHOIS services were being hammered and the data was being used for domain slamming and bogus renewal invoices. Most of the ccTLD registries stopped making their zonefiles available about then. Some of the smaller ccTLD registries publish new domain lists.

Over the past ten years or so, the markets in countries where there is an active ccTLD have become increasingly ccTLD focused at the expense of the other TLDs. Because of the pondscum intellected "don't link" propaganda, the ccTLD markets are becoming increasingly opaque to Google. And many of the Google FUD buddies don't understand country level markets and their importance. The funny thing is that Google and its FUD buddies haven't a clue about what is actually happening in the domain name business. Ironically that is going to be one Hell of a nasty wakeup call for Google and quite a lot of others in 2015 (and it is not about new gTLDs).

ARIN does provide limited bulk acess under certain conditions, from what I remember.

Regards...jmcc

[micklearn]

Yep - like every one I've ever seen. If Google put more effort into outreach to show people how to do BASIC stuff in AdWords like utilise negative keywords and fragment their campaigns into groups then people would stay on. The most common comment I get from people about AdWords is 'tried it, wasted my money'.

Yup, I don't understand why Yahoo! and Bing staff can provide support over the phone at any time but Google can't afford to do that...maybe that will be an emerging trend they wake up to considering in 2015.

[FranticFish]

They have started arranging 1 hour consultations, but the two people I've spoken to that had them don't think they helped them at all. They couldn't tell me what they'd learned.

A third client's campaign that I had set up myself performed worse after a Google rep 'optimised' it for them. Their CTR went down by several % across the board, especially their best-performing keywords, and the spend went down by 25% too.

[EditorialGuy]

The most common comment I get from people about AdWords is 'tried it, wasted my money'.

Part of the problem is that Google is serving two constituencies with AdWords: Professional media buyers and advertisers who want plenty of bells and whistles, and mom-and-pop business owners (say, a local garbage hauler or the owner of a gift shop) who need something as simple as buying a classified ad in newspaper used to be.

Effective media buying requires at least as much expertise as SEO does, and it's understandable that a lot of business owners throw up their hands early on (ideally, before they've gone broke from ineptly-managed ad expenditures).

[lucy24]

ARIN does provide limited bulk acess under certain conditions, from what I remember.

Without drifting too far o/t ... is there a reliable place I can read up on how .ca (specifically) works? I would hate to think that some nasty robot learned of a domain's existence only because I'd mentioned or linked to them from my dot com :(

[seoskunk]

Google gains information about domains from browsers, counters, social bookmarking tools and a broad spectrum of info sources not just registers. I think it has to so as to satisfy and fulfill all its commitments. No such thing as a secret domain on the internet.

[Whitey]

...., and 2015 predictions are - Any more crystal balls out there to keep things rolling OT?

[ning]

- Matt Cutt's may have left his previous Google role for good [ is there such a need for a role on outreach with the new algo's ]... what's the signal ?

Wouldn't happen/

[Zivush]

Anything done 'for the sake of' SEO will cause problems whilst links and opportunities which have a gravity of their own are valued by Google.

Google wants to rank websites based on how authoritative and popular they are, not based on how much SEO has been performed. In its truest form, optimizing a site for Google is more akin to removing technical roadblocks rather than shady manipulative tactics (which often use links as a lever).

Google is (supposed to be) a reflection of popular interest, NOT an active driving force. This means that if you perform an action which doesn't legitimately raise the status of your site, Google don't want to value it!

Simple :)

[Rasputin]

On non-commercial terms I am seeing various experiments with expanding Knowledge Graph that could be extended and rolled out in 2015

e.g. adding how much a word has been used over time, translation options for a search word, etymology, additional related items a searcher might perhaps be interested in...

[i.imgur.com ]
[i.imgur.com ]

[superclown2]

I predict that more merchants are going to offer cheaper (or even FREE to certain customers) tablets as prices continue to fall. They will be maximised to promote their products, naturally.

Another small nail in the coffin of search engines.

[LanceBachmann1]

2015 SEO Guidelines

Some says SEO is dying, some says SEO is getting tougher. But the thing is SEO is getting refined and better day by day. Gone are days seeing results by pulling 5-10 links from rich keyword density content adding anchor text to high PR sites, High Page Rank domains providing link juice...

These are the few 2015 SEO tactics that will help you in getting LIFE in SEO.

1. Drop old classic method of keyword research and opt modern keyword research technique to lead in race.
2. Keyword Matching with proper use of Synonym related keywords in Metas
3. Focus on building Brand and Brand Value counts.
4. Collect the concepts, topics, intents, related searches, & popular content you find. So Think connected.

5. Group the keywords by overlapping the indent.
6. Content is still the king. Dont only remain unique with it but also use synonyms and co-relation in it as Google search is more of human now.

[Sand]

I think it's inevitable that user experience metrics become more important, and I'm sure Google will continue to figure out exactly what those are and how to measure them.

I also think that traditional SEO (meaning on-page adjustments) will continue to become less and less important as Google better understands language and intent.

[Whitey]

@LanceBachmann1 - welcome to Webmasterworld and Seasons Greetings

6. Content is still the king. Dont only remain unique with it but also use synonyms and co-relation in it as Google search is more of human now.

Do you think Google will be impressed with short forms of content in 2015, rather than quantity - generally speaking, with mobile in mind ?

btw - I predict no more globalised penalties from 2015 and onwards, except in peripheral areas of spamming. Penguin and Panda are it as far as I can see. I kinda see this taking some of the direction @LanceBachmann1 is hinting at.

[seoskunk]

I see an increase in social media by buyers who recognise, find a site through a search engine and you get the website, find a site through social media you get the website + the latest offers

[glakes]

Of course, Amazon extracts a stiff price for allowing third-party vendors to sell its products. Here's Amazon's referral-fee schedule, for those who haven't seen it:

[sellercentral.amazon.com...]

It isn't surprising that quite a few businesses are happy to trade the stability of being an Amazon vendor for the uncertainties of organic search when the latter is free.

<snip> Though selling on Amazon may be costly for some, there always is Amazon's product ads. And comparatively speaking, the cost of advertising products on Amazon is 1/5th of what it costs on Google Adwords. Additionally, traffic from Amazon is primed to buy whereas Google has a lot of tire kickers, more click fraud and questionable competition (advertisements of limited relevancy/arbitrage).

Organic search for ecommerce sites selling products has dried up and requires participating in Adwords if you want any measurable traffic - because everything above the fold in Google is mostly paid ads or Google verticals. Those that can grow a business with long tail traffic may be okay with just organic search (for now), but even long tail traffic for ecommerce is showing negative growth.

<snip> For those who do want to learn something, and happen to sell products, search for Amazon product ads in your favorite search engine (sorry I don't have enough posts to post live links). Amazon is giving away $75 in free clicks for new advertisers that signup. Expect a minimum of twice the conversions from Amazon as compared to Adwords.

Happy Holidays

[edited by: aakk9999 at 11:49 am (utc) on Dec 24, 2014]
[edit reason] ToS [/edit]

[lucy24]

Further query: When people talk about search, do they mean "using a search engine's functionality, whether knowingly or otherwise" or do they mean "intentionally going to some specific search engine in order to make an inquiry"? With browsers willfully obfuscating the difference between address bar and search box, it's becoming harder to spell out exactly what "search" means. In fact, it's becoming harder not to search, even when you hadn't meant to.