You will always walk one step behind Google. But what if you could guess what Google would do in the future with their algos? Then you're a step further then Google! But how can you look into the future? Well, very simple, just look what Google did over the past.

The past

Google liked inbound links to your website, if you had a lot of good links to your page it would get a high ranking. Then webmasters thought of something, some kind of deal between websites: linkexchanges. Website A linked to Website B and Website B linked back to Website A. This way they could manipulate the search engine result pages by exchanging links with eachother.

Googles reaction

Google's reaction on this new sort of marketing was to decrease value of inbound links from linkexchanges.

You can do this action-reaction thing with multiple SEO happenings of the past and see that google always decreased or increased the value of other factors in search engine optimization.

So let's look into the future now...

The future

It's always a race of SEO's against the search engines. And the SEO's have found something new right now, automated linkbuilding. The coop (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/?s=14566) and linkvault (http://www.link-vault.com/?ss=1237) are well known by many people and is no black hat SEO. It's simple and effective. Because with only one link per page on your site you get a lot of links to your site back from other domains. But most of those links are not really relative to your site. So what Google probably would do is decrease the weight of irrelevant links and increase the weight of relevant links. They allready done that but the gap would probably become bigger.

And if you speculate a little more you will come to a conclusion that age is going to be a bigger factor in Google because it's the only thing webmasters can't manipulate.

Also, Google will probably give more weight to 'in-content' links then to those link lists at the bottom of your page.

So, be aware of Google's and YOUR future as a SEO and think forward.

About The Author

Wouter Komtiedan is the author of google-optimalisatie.blogspot.com, the dutch SEO blog to succes!

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