Coming changes in the SEO world
The sky is not falling, but your move could happen in the near future.
There is no doubt that Google was the dominant force. There is also no doubt that Microsoft has the financial and human resources necessary to seriously compete and potentially regain the upper hand. As Google has grown to a size comparable to Microsoft’s, it has lost much of the “little man who tries harder” appeal that once helped it gain strong public support.
Many users don’t care which search engine they use as long as they get the results they want. Google is clearly behind in this area. In an attempt to filter more websites through artificial means to improve their rankings, they removed large numbers of legitimate websites from the SERPs and often initially blocked newer websites from displaying. While I applaud their efforts to combat websites that use spam techniques to replace legitimate websites, I can say without a doubt that if they do not find a better way to do this, they will lose significant market share due to market developments. There are several reasons, some of which are less obvious:
people want relevant and timely results. If Google continues to delay ranking new websites and webpages for relevant terms, users will look elsewhere to find more up-to-date results. Many website owners who use Google AdSense will turn to competing services from Yahoo and MSN where they will likely get their traffic. Since advertising is a source of income for website owners, they are exposed to search engines that help them earn more.
Many website owners remove Google Search from their websites because they are not generating traffic from Google.
People who know networking are often asked for advice by people who are less computer literate. It doesn’t take many bitter website owners telling these people to use a competing search engine before Google sees results from their profits. Microsoft is working on Windows Vista (www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.aspx), in fact a beta version has already been released. So Microsoft is going to do serious damage to Google’s business because it has built a handy little search box right into the operating system.