SEO Blog

If you’ve been following the latest online news with even a casual interest, you will no doubt have read a good deal about the various changes going on with the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Google are currently in the process of rolling of their real-time element within the search engine results. Bing too have adopted these Twitter updates and will soon be getting Facebook messages to display too. So what does this mean for SEO? Well, not a lot really. Yes, it is a significant change and the SERPs pages will look different; but ultimately it won’t affect your ability to optimise for certain key phrases and achieve a high level ranking.

So whilst SERPs are getting cluttered, the politics is no less complex. Microsoft and Yahoo have finally concluded their deal, which is currently in arbitration awaiting confirmation by the US Government, to join forces and work to their strengths. This means that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will be used to power both domains whilst Yahoo controls the advertising. This could of course be major.

Suddenly, rather than optimising wholly for Google there is a very real alternative. Ensuring a good ranking on Bing, conforming with their rules and the variations in ranking factors, will suddenly allow you to tap into a far wider audience – although the combined powers of Yahoo and Bing still only control around 9% of the UK search market. That said, it is still a very serious merger and should be treated as such; if Google were to lose more of its market share, then SEO would have to adjust (albeit on slightly) to the changing conditions.

Back to Google, and they are firing out all sorts of new updates for you to look out for. The one that is causing most buzz currently (that could change by tomorrow) is the inclusion of page load time as a ranking factor.

So from here on your website may find itself dipping, or indeed raising, as a consequence of your site speed within the SERPs. This is purely a quality thing from Google and has been discussed for some time; however, it joins well over 100 other ranking factors all of which have their own levels of importance within the Google algorithm. Whilst it might not be a traditional area for SEO, soon you will need to start considering page load time to ensure that the rest of your optimisation work isn’t being undermined.

Google have arguably been the busiest though, even with Bing continuing to innovate before their proposed merger. With search speeds increasing and numerous changes to their algorithm, it is going to be interesting to see how those eventually settle. Because whilst we get snippets of information from the likes of Google, often the only way of working out how SEO has been affected by their changes is by testing.

Websites always fluctuate in the rankings. It might only be a couple of positions across a few phrases, but nothing stays still for long. Algorithm changes are certainly nothing new, so this latest spate of updates is unlikely to cause anybody significant consternation. It’s certainly something to watch, and in the case of site speed, something to rectify, but certainly nothing to panic over.