Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org and Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland.com had a discussion about the next generation of search engines and how to optimize for them.
SEO’s are living in the world of search 3.0 which is a mixture of regular search results and vertical results. So for example a Google search on the term “form a business” may contain 8 results for individual websites and 2 vertical results, such as Business.com and Allbusiness.com. The vertical search results are really niche directories with a list of focused results
In general here is a breakdown of search engines
- Search 1.0: on page content. this is the birth of meta tags, doorway pages and hidden keyword spamming. the 1.0 search engines are excite.com, lycos.com, infoseek.com, hotbot.com
- Search 2.0 off page content which is mainly links and mentiones. The more links you get the higher your PageRank and site authority.
- Search 3.0 integrating vertical, local and specific results. Google reserves the top 3 spaces on local searches for a map and local results. So if you search for “los angeles plumber” you will see a map with the business location of each plumber.
- Search 4.0 personalization and further refining. My results will be based on my past query history and previous clickthroughs. Your results will look different than mine.
- Search 5.0 live answers and human interaction. Yahoo answers is an excellent example of human help for information you cannot find from machine created algorithms.
See Rand Fishkin interview Danny Sullivan.
It’s really more Danny talking as Rand just sits and listens. Danny could be said to be one with the search engines, truly a Zen SEO, as once he starts talking about search he can’t stop!
One Response
I’m still studying Danny Sullivan and read SEL every day.