Girdy is the head of media technology and this means he tends to view sites, campaigns and other digital tools as media assets.

It’s possible that you could sit down at your desk tomorrow and discover your website has very different organic search rankings and that you have a whole new set of competitors.

Google has announced a change to a fifteen-year-old rule that governed SEO.

Let's first quickly summarise what is going on and how it could result in Google looking at the internet with fresh eyes overnight.

You’re no doubt well aware that links are a significant part of Google's algorithm. A link from a trusted site is a strong signal that the editors of that site are endorsing the webpage they are linking to. 

For example, if an international newspaper publishes an article on their website about 'search engine optimisation' and it links to your page about SEO, Google responds by increasing the importance of your page because of that endorsement.

Fifteen years ago, Google had enough of spammers trying to game the system and introduced a way for websites to link to others, without implying that the mention was also a vote of confidence. That method was the 'nofollow' attribute for links.

From a technical point of view, when Google sees 'nofollow' on a link, it tends to ignore that link.

For example, Wikipedia was an early adopter and added 'nofollow' to all its external links by default. As a result, spam on Wikipedia dropped considerably, as unethical SEOs no longer had reason to edit articles to include links to specific sites. 

Wordpress also adopted the protocol to automatically make all links left in comments “nofollow links” as a way to reduce comment spam. 

Under Google’s new system ‘nofollow’ becomes more of a suggestion to Google, rather than a strong request - and two alternatives have been introduced. Google’s machine-learning enhanced algorithm may come to assign some SEO value to these new link types. Or Google may conclude that a statistically high number of these new link types is a negative quality signal, rather than a positive one. As a result, Google will have a huge number of new data points to analyse. 

Yesterday, a prominent WordPress developer, Joost de Valk signalled that the blogging platform would quickly move away from ‘nofollow’ links.

Wordpress is not the only huge platform to use ‘nofollow’ links. I looked on the code search engine publicwww and quickly found 10 other large sites that might be tempted to swap ‘nofollow’ for one of Google’s new link types:

Why is nofollow so prevalent? Forum owners, sites with blog comments and similar, also added 'nofollow' to all the links in the user-generated sections of their sites. Again, this was an effort to remove the incentive for spammy content stuffed with links to be left behind.

Importantly, 'nofollow' also meant that sponsorships, PR activity and other content created as a result of compensation should have also used nofollow. For example, if a blogger receives a free product to review, then Google would expect that blogger to add 'nofollow' to any link back to the product sellers website.

Google’s new, more nuanced approach introduces two alternative (perhaps softer) values below 'nofollow'. 

One is 'ugc' (user-generated content) for sites like Wikipedia, and the other is 'sponsored' for bloggers and anyone media owner who might sell links.

I’ve gone into much more detail below about the reasons for these changes. But first, let’s consider a possible edge case scenario that would have a massive impact on what type of content appears in search results.

Last week, Wikipedia automatically added 'nofollow' to every external link. Unless Google has been making an exception for the hugely popular site, it means Google's ranking algorithm has been ignoring Wikipedia links as positive SEO signals for the sites that receive them.

This week, Wikipedia may decide that 'ugc' is a more appropriate value to add to its external links. If that happens, we could wake up to an internet in which Google credits some value to user-generated links and now has the entire scope of Wikipedia's vast bank of content re-examine with these new values in mind.

I think this is an unlikely scenario as my gut-feeling is Google already has special rules for Wikipedia and that Wikipedia has no real incentive to make the change. (The same could have been said about WordPress, though, and it looks extremely likely they will be making the change.)

Smaller changes that will impact SEO over time are also likely. In particular, blogger outreach can now be more liberal with freebies and sponsorships because PR and SEO agencies can negotiate for 'sponsored' links. 

Sites that want to encourage user-generated content might decide to soften their automatic 'nofollow' policies in favour of 'ugc' disclosed links in the hope of encouraging contributions. 

To fully understand these changes, it helps to take a step back to see the big picture. 

Google's original algorithm leaned heavily on a mechanic called PageRank. The first generations of PageRank used links from one web page to another in order to count and weigh the importance of the pages involved. The more inbound links a webpage had, the more likely it was to rank more highly.

The importance of links for SEO created a whole industry around chasing links. It manifested first in what I call the Industrial era of SEO and which Google's first head of webspam, Matt Cutts, once referred to as B.O (backlink obsession). 

Google had created two thorny problems which it needed to solve.

The first problem was spam. Sites that allowed users to generate content became riddled with poor quality, often inaccurate, content as people submitted links purely for gaming Google's link greedy algorithm. 

The second problem was bought links. The algorithm wanted to treat links as endorsements from one expert to a page that that expert trusted. However, brands began to purchase advertising space from bloggers, newspapers and magazines in the form of text links. These site owners pointed out that they should be able to monetise in any way they saw fit.

As I’ve already outlined above, the solution was the 'nofollow' value for links. Site owners could now add 'nofollow' to a link to remove that implicit vote of confidence for the page the link pointed to. 

In 2012, Google tripped up over its own rules. It had commissioned a series of advert videos for distribution bloggers via the platform Unruly Media. Unruly asked bloggers to write about Google's products and include the video. Some of those bloggers also included a link back to Google's Chrome page and did not add 'nofollow' to those links. It caused an outcry in the SEO industry. There have been other occasions when PR activity has resulted in SEO harm because neither the PR company nor bloggers knew or understood the 'nofollow' rules and accidentally created links that Google considered not sufficiently editorially pure.

The algorithm has changed since those early days. Google now uses machine-learning technology called RankBrain to assist its algorithm, and it uses human testers to help determine which version of the algorithm yields the best results, but links remain incredibly strong signals. 

It's only been in recent months that the majority view of 'search engine optimisation professionals' has come around to considering content more important than links. Rand Fishkin's survey of 1,500 SEOs for SparkToro puts 'Quality of linking sites & pages' as the second most important SEO signal.

The rise of content is due to two factors. 

The first is that Google has become much better at evaluating content. It now identifies and dislikes content with too many ads, or which offers up poor user experience. Equally, the algorithm is much better at detecting and rewarding content that is written by subject matter experts. 

The second is that to earn a link, without a 'nofollow', from a subject matter expert requires outstanding content. Successful brands invest hugely in user experience and content marketing, and that pushes average quality and expectations higher.

I labelled this trend the Renaissance era of SEO. 

An unexpected side effect of these changes is that Google finds it has to work harder to discover content.

To attract links, brands need people to see their new content. Social media is a great place to share content so that people can discover it and yet most social platforms use ‘nofollow’ links as standard.

If Google treats 'nofollow' as 'ignore this link' then it can't easily monitor webpages like forums or public Facebook groups. 

For example: A couple of threads of investment advice forums start talking about a new stocks and shares ISA, occasionally linking, but with nofollow values, to a newly created product page. Under the old system Google may have to ignore those user-generated links and wait to discover the new ISA page when it cycles back around to indexing the financial services company's website. Even then, Google's crawler might not notice the new page if it is buried deep in the site.

This example also works for how the new system might affect SEO. If those same investment advice forums start to use the 'ugc' value on links instead of 'nofollow' then Google will follow those links to the new ISA page and may count them as quality signals too. If the latter happens, then the company launching the new ISA will gain an SEO boost as a result of being talked about on forums. 

The 'nofollow' value for the relationship attribute is fifteen years old, but Signal's SEO team regularly encounters bloggers and site owners who have never heard of it, use it incorrectly or wilfully ignore it. 

Google has just made linking out to external sites more complex. It seems all too possible that bloggers and other independent publishers might fail to adopt rel="ugc" and rel="sponsored". If that happens, Google will probably drop its support for the newly created values.

If you are linking to a site that you do not wish to endorse in any way or where you want to reduce the incentive for others to leave SEO-minded spam as much as possible, use rel="nofollow". 

If you are linking to a site you have a commercial relationship with or if you're arranging a link from a website you have a business relationship with, ensure rel="sponsored" is used.

Lastly, if you are allowing users to create content and links on a platform you run but see no need to distance yourself entirely from that content, then add rel="ugc" to those links.

Google's new rules could change the SEO landscape overnight

Google's latest change to a 15 year old SEO rule means that you may now have very different organic search rankings and a whole new set of competitors. 

SEO hasn’t got any easier since I entered the industry many moons ago. But it has changed significantly during that time. 

Considering the evolution of search engine optimisation might risk being nostalgic, rather than being forward-thinking - and being resistant to change, rather than embracing it. 

But I think it is worthwhile, because by understanding Google's trajectory we can make better decisions around content and discovery for our clients, now and in the future.

The rise and fall in popularity of different SEO techniques can be used to define three previous eras of search engine optimisation:

And I think we're now in the fourth era: Enlightenment SEO. 

Sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? I’ll try and justify the name by the time we get to the end of this article. 

I’ve graphed each of those eras below, based on my experience of each. I've put aside those aspects which will likely remain true forever (for example researching how potential customers search for goods and services, and competitor research). 

I then graphed, in percentage terms, how much of your SEO time/budget you would probably spend on a campaign on any given year.

According to my calculations, the shape of SEO changes dramatically as the years progress:

I’ve also expanded on each era with some quick (and more traditionally text-based) summaries below.

This first era of search engine optimisation is characterised by tech and meta tags. 

Engaging in SEO without speaking to anyone in the brand's marketing team was not unheard of back then. Search engine optimisation was a thing done to websites, and websites were run by a company's tech team. As an SEO professional, you would speak to a company's Head of IT, and entire sites might have been built by just one or two people.  

No one in IT wanted to write meta tags or had heard of Inktomi, and Google was the new kid on the block with a "Don't Be Evil" philosophy.  

Back then, technical SEO was important because web developers would routinely create sites that Google (and others) struggled to read. Common culprits were issues like entire sites built in frames, Flash or sessions in URLs. 

SEOs would spend time filling in 'guestbooks' on webpages, adding a link back to their client. When Google said these sorts of spammy links would no longer be counted, no SEO protested because no one had built a business or reputation dependent on the technique.  

The original set of meta tags stopped having value after they were systematically misused and misunderstood, and could no longer be trusted. 

SEO quickly proved its worth and attracted the attention of marketing departments.  

It was clear what was required to influence Google's algorithm: websites needed links.

Whole industries were born from the concept of 'link building'. Links from directory sites, article sites and press release sites had value (at least for a while) in Google's eyes. So people built directory sites, article sites and press release websites to cash in on this interest. SEO specialists built processes and teams around the mass production of links via these willing participants. 

Google responded by raising the quality bar. First, the search engine made it clear that link building - links created via a process rather than an editorial decision - would stop having value for their algorithm. Then, slowly but surely, Google removed directories, article sites and even press release sites' ability to influence rankings. Lastly, and in a project that continues to this day, Google started to fight back against websites that would sell links for money or services. 

Once again, Google reacted to the strip-mining and systematic misuse of quality signals its algorithm once considered as necessary, by discounting them entirely.

SEO adapted, as it always does, to the changes in the landscape driven through by Google.

The search engines continued to get better at spotting only those links genuinely created after editorial consideration. The company also continued to push the qualifying standards for websites to have an influence on the algorithm even higher. In response, SEOs got better at earning editorial links from well known editorial sites.

Social media, public relations and search engine optimisation overlapped, as in-house marketing teams and agencies pitched content and stories to bloggers, magazines and newspapers.  

Content marketing, creativity, design and SEO overlapped as the same teams collaborated on (or fought over) the creation and publication of 'content' that would earn links, convert customers, or both.

For a short but glorious time, the 'Renaissance era' felt right. Finally, SEOs were thinking about the content, and it wasn't something the industry could strip-mine.

However, we got the sausage machine instead. Content, even excellent content, was pumped out. Bloggers were inundated by pitches. The bar for success in terms of impressing audiences continued to rise. 

At the same time doubts over 'influencers' rose too. After all, most SEOs have been told by a site owner that they maybe could carry the story - but only if there happened to be some budget available...

The cycle continues. Those making the most out of the changing shape of SEO are already adapting. 

It isn't as if SEO is a dark art any more, though. Google now clearly communicates what it is trying to do. On the search engine's 20th birthday last year, Google said clearly it was moving away from queries and towards journeys and information. 

The first and foremost principle of their next 20 years will be a focus on the user.

SEOs debate how Google evaluates its success with pleasing the user. The search engine's spokespeople officially deny using measurements like clickthrough rate or bounce rate in its ranking algorithms. But we also know that the company are simultaneously patenting and developing technologies to improve search results based on those very same user experience signals. 

However, few SEOs will debate that Google rewards sites that do well in areas that search engine considers essential to users, such as page speed or mobile friendliness.

Despite that clarity, this shift towards user experience feels like a latecomer to SEO strategies. This may, in part, be due to the historical separation of UX and SEO in agencies and in-house teams. By my reckoning, though, the momentum is turning, and user experience considerations are slowly becoming a more significant factor in search engine optimisation.

The most successful SEO teams are adapting their outreach tactics too. It is possible, and often wise, to design campaigns in a way that maximise the chances of editorial coverage. It helps, for example, to consider the user experience of a blogger or other publisher before planning the outreach campaign. What interesting stories can you bring to their attention, and how will you ensure they open your emails?

I feel “Enlightenment” is an appropriate, albeit optimistic name for this SEO era. Once again I’m borrowing from history and looking to a time when less was taken on faith and more on reason. In today’s SEO, we are better at taking actions based on data rather than superstition. And we care more about the individual and their experience.

Critically for search engine optimisation in our current era of Enlightenment, you now have two audiences of individuals to consider. 

You have your (or your client's) customers and potential customers as one audience set, and you have publishers (people capable of creating quality signals like links), who can amplify your content. 

Both these audiences are relevant, and in this new era of SEO, both need your full attention. 

Sadly, this does not mean that all SEO is Enlightenment SEO, and that it’s all now done with UX, content and a sophisticated multi-audience strategy. Every day I see evidence of SEO from all eras, including Prehistoric. That's great if it works for you in your niche today. I just wouldn’t bet on it working for you tomorrow.

If you have differing opinions on the shape of SEO in 2019, you can cast your vote here. Any changes will be reflected on our live results chart.

SEO era illustrations: John Harfield, Senior Designer

The four eras of SEO - how marketers can adapt

The changing shape of SEO and how marketers can adapt to the current era.

If you want more people to like your website then make it faster - particularly on mobile.

According to research shared by Google,  40% of shoppers will abandon a retail or travel site if it has not loaded within three seconds.

In fact, the search engine giant is such a strong advocate of this message, that it launched an open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project last year.

News organisations were Google’s initial target for the project, but the company is now working hard to boost the attraction of AMP to all sorts of brands.

So do publishers of all kinds need to be jumping on the AMP bandwagon, or is it just beneficial for the big newspaper brands? 

Rapid loading is just one of the perks of Google’s AMP. The search engine also rewards those sites which use it by qualifying them for prominent positions in search. AMP has been quickly adopted by many of the major news publishers for this very reason.

The fact that the setup helps reduce the impact of ad blockers (by hosting ads on the same server as the content) is also a big lure for an industry that increasingly relies on online advertising income.

However AMP has not been without controversy. For a start, AMP versions of your web pages aren’t even on your website but are hosted by Google’s lightning fast content delivery network (CDN) instead, raising questions over content ownership.

Additionally the rules that help ensure AMP content loads as swiftly as it does, also place wide ranging restrictions on design and technology - for example it doesn't allow render-blocking javascript.

This week, a study from SEMRush looked at over 300 of the top publishers across eight countries and discovered far less than 50% of them had added AMP content to their sites and over 70% had technical errors in the content they had published:

So if newspapers are struggling with implementing AMP, should you adopt it for your site?

Being fast to load is also an advantage for ecommerce sites. At Google Marketing Next this year we were reminded that conversions can drop by up to 20% for every one second of page load delay:

Google Ads, Analytics and DoubleClick Announcements Keynote

In addition, AdWords, Google’s PPC offering, will soon be expanding to cope with AMP landing pages. In their introductory blog post on the rollout, ecommerce is used as the example:

It's a powerful demo as it shows, very quickly, that when a customer knows what they want to buy, they will be more likely to buy from the fast and faff- free option.

There are already some good examples of how AMP is working for a wider range of brands.

Over at State of Digital the technical SEO expert Barry Adams shared some details from an ecommerce client that saw an improvement in conversions after introducing AMP.  Barry admits problems with the case study though - noting that the AMP content was only used for the site’s blog posts because AMP doesn’t yet provide the full functionality required for ecommerce - and that the average order value dropped.

Another examination of the value of AMP pages comes from Seven League’s Daniel Ayers who looks at the performance of the Newcastle United website. They had a new kit to launch and here AMP played a vital role helping to improve clickthroughs (CTR). Seven League conclude that mobile search should be a key source of traffic for football sites and that failure to adopt AMP will make that challenging.

In the Middle East and Asia Pacific the travel comparison site Wego.com used AMP for some specific customer searches, terms like ‘cheap flights to Hong Kong’, and reduced page loading times from 11 seconds to less than one. The results were dramatic, with conversion rates to partner sites soaring by 95% and search-to-conversion rates going up by nearly 50%.

Ultimately, AMP should be on the consideration list of any brand paying attention to digital transformation.

Right now, AMP is worth doing for the immediate wins it will bring publishers across all brands, but there are still some limitations. And it also needs to be considered in relation to all the other challenges digitally savvy brands are addressing today - and in most cases AMP will not be priority.

Therefore, the platform has secured its place on the to-do list but is unlikely to be at the top for most.

Meanwhile, Google will be working hard to push their mobile program up that list. And we'll be keeping a close eye on how the project develops so we can advise our clients on whether it's right for them.

News sites are struggling with AMP. Can your brand do better?

Google's AMP has many benefits for brands - but may not have been implemented properly by news publishers.

Google has revealed it will change its famously empty homepage. The company plans to add in a feed to show news stories, videos and algorithmically determined highlights.

This is despite the fact that the clutter-free homepage is one of the iconic aspects of the Google brand, which helped it rapidly become the world’s most popular search engine.

What does it mean for users and advertisers? 
If successful the new homepage style could change how Google’s billions of users experience search. The platform will try and predict what people might be interested in and suggest that before any search happens. Such a significant change in how people use Google will influence brands’ search marketing strategies.

Google will certainly not be the first to try this technique. Rival search engine Bing already shows news stories in a strip across the bottom of its homepage, and Facebook dominates the newsfeed strategy.

Of course, Facebook’s business is based on allowing brands to inject sponsored content. Google will not say whether it has similar plans, but if so it could be a hugely significant new advertising channel - and potentially merging some of the current functions of Google News and Google+.

What will it look like?
We've imagined what the new Google homepage might look like and, with the help of our Art Director Matt, the end results are below. The first example uses a column approach that Google already favours in its “dialer” homepage variant – popular URLs shown when a new Chrome tab is opened – and by Google+.

Google has been moving heavily into a card design format and it is expected that trend will continue to the revamped homepage. Below are examples of how this might look on tablets such as Apple’s iPad and the Microsoft Surface.

Google Now, now on your desktop? 
This will not be Google’s first attempt at a customised homepage either. The search engine experimented with ‘iGoogle’ until 2013 and allowed brands to build widgets for users to add to their search experience.

However iGoogle has since been superseded by Google Now for smartphones and it is likely the new Google will draw on this. It may even be a desktop evolution of the service.

Google Now shows trending news, news that Google has personalised to individuals, weather, sports and other alerts. It also tracks some deliveries, gives price alerts, fitness summaries, birthday, events and flight reminders and a host of other predictive suggestions. It is sophisticated enough to know that a search for [car insurance] does not necessarily indicate an interest in the finance industry whereas a search for [Avengers: Infinity War] is more likely to suggest an interest in the movie.

Popping the filter bubble 
The search engine is promising to show news suggestions from a wide range of sources as to avoid concerns about the ‘filter bubble’ effect in which people only get their news from organisations that support their point of view. This may frustrate supporters of campaigns like Hope Not Hate who are already campaigning to give people the ability to entirely block extremist publications from Google News.

We’re very excited to see how Google implement this huge change to their homepage’s UX and what the reaction is from their users.

Big thanks to Matt for his art direction.

Is this what the new Google will look like?

With Google planning to change its famously empty homepage, we muse over what the future of search might look like and what it means for SEO.

Andrew Girdwood

Head of Media Technology

Google's new rules could change the SEO landscape overnight

The four eras of SEO - how marketers can adapt

News sites are struggling with AMP. Can your brand do better?

Is this what the new Google will look like?

Cheltenham

Edinburgh

London