I wonder if Nostradamus really made any predictions about google. The way people interpret the guys ranting to suit all sorts of different stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised if we could find a few of his quatrains really do apply to google..

Personally, I think we will see google move away from backlinks as a popularity measurement in the near future. I think it is becoming obvious to everyone, including google, that backlinks are no longer any sort of accurate measure of a sites popularity, much less quality/usefulness. I could be wrong, but I think the days of the coveted backlink are numbered.

Google stomped the competition a decade ago, by looking at links instead of reading keyword stuffed content and meta data. It worked brilliantly back then because all the garbage, and all the SEO at that time was focused on keyword stuffing, but not so many people were linking to the trash. A decade later and SEO is all about backlinks. Whoever can throw the most money at it can have the most backlinks. Yes there are innumerable ways to get backlinks, and if you can put more money into it (time and energy also equate to money) you can get more high quality backlinks.

One would think that google’s interest would be primarily in voluntary backlinks. Not backlinks which the linked to site somehow arranged. These days though, I think the number of ‘arranged’ backlinks on the net may well exceed the number of voluntary ones.

The fact that SEO is so focused on backlinks and google is still weighing backlinks heavily, leaves google wide open to the same sort of defeat that all the other big players suffered to google a decade ago. We are already seeing some young search engines cropping up that are focusing on different methods of measuring relevance.

Google probably won’t just rest on their laurels, they probably know better than that. If google results give me only the top SEOed sites but some fresh, young search engine gives me the most relevant content – I will go with the relevant content every time. A lot of consumers would love to jump ship too, they just need a viable alternative.

On the one hand, I would love for google to get away from weighing links so heavily, it is a method which makes less and less sense every day. On the other hand, I dread such a change, because we may find ourselves needing to start from scratch with SEO and/or having to learn all different tricks..

Good job!