What Can We Expect from Google Search Next

When we work on our SEO, often we will focus on making sure that our website is designed perfectly along with the content and inbound links for improving our ranking in Google’s current algorithms. And of course this makes sense as what We Expect from Google Search is by far the most popular search engine out there. However while doing SEO for Google as it is might make sense, what would actually be even more prudent would be to design SEO to work with a Google of the future. Google Penguin and Panda have demonstrated recently how Google is constantly moving forward and how playing catch up can actually get you into a lot of trouble. Far better then would be to be able to pre-empt Google’s next move and to thereby be able to avoid falling foul to being penalized while simultaneously getting the drop on the competition.

Of course most of us don’t possess an SEO crystal ball (and if we did we certainly would not share it), but it is nevertheless possible to make some fairly educated guesses as to where Google might be heading with its changes by looking at the patterns of previous changes and by thinking logically about what the search giants are trying to achieve long term.

Here then are some predictions about tomorrow’s Google to help you to hopefully repair for the future landscape of SEO…

We Expect From Google Search More Semantic

Google is chatting a lot about semantic search at the moment, and the concept is simply that Google is soon going to be able to more understand what you’re looking for instead of just looking at exact matches in the text. Theoretically this will result in more accurate results for readers, but what it means for webmasters and bloggers is that keyword stuffing really has had its day and it’s time to move on. What Google will be looking for more now is synonyms and generally sites that are genuinely on a subject rather than just trying to look like they are by repeating a specific word. You can actually notice this now more in the search when Google starts to rephrase your question for the sake of some of the results.

Social Search

Next up is social search. This is another big idea that Google is pushing forward, the idea here being that social cues can be used as a good sign of a website being popular or having authority. Google has recently introduced Google Plus which it has integrated with other services. It’s not going to be long until they start ranking websites based on how many people have clicked plus one on them.

You need to take advantage of this simply by ensuring you join in fast. You should already have a plus one account and you should already have plus one buttons on your site. This will also help as Google Plus inevitably gets more popular and as more and more people start seeing your results on ‘Google Plus Your World’.