A good friend of my husband's informed him today that his business partner in San Francisco met with some Google afficiandos yesterday, Jaunuary 23, 2008, and was informed by them that Google will not longer index keywords. This does NOT apply to other search engines, but Google is used in ~75-85% of all web searches. Has anyone else heard this information? 'Could change the world of SEO.
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Yeah, the question is always what is the secret that google will use to rate sites, but there has been speculation about changes when really people don't fully know what the current formula is. My thought is build a great website that people want to go to and come back to and make sure it's easy to use and that in itself will cause you to do well. I wouldn't worry about changes because they only affect weak sites that put all their eggs in a SEO basket instead of actually haveing a great site that people love.
Check out my new website and tell me what you think. It's still a work in progress. www.TeamQuintana.com Ross Quintana - Team Quintana Real Estate
Spokan Real Estate
Yes, it's true. If you're talking about keyword META tags. Google does not use keyword META tags in their ranking algorythms. However, this has been true for years and years... probably over 6 years! Nothing new here!
The early search engines (before Google), such as Excite, Alta Vista, Web Crawler, etc. used to use the keyword META tag to determine search results. Very quickly people found out how easy it was to manipulate search results - just by putting your competitor's keywords in your META tags, as well as other things (some people put sexual terms in their keywords, because that was the #1 thing people searched for!).
Then came Google. They basically IGNORED the keyword META tag and looked at many, many OTHER things, like backlinks, actual keywords on the page, title tags, age of the domain, content, etc. Most of the other search engines now either ignore keyword META tags or they hold very, very little weight, depending on who you talk to.
It sounds like persistence & time is the key. Just keep delivering good content consistently, over time. There are no real shortcuts when it comes to Google.
Yahoo ranking, on the other hand is fairly easy to achieve if you have a quality site and put alot of what you read here on AR into practice. Unfortunately Google accounts for the lions share of searches.