Google is an unpredictable search engine

If you’ve worked with Google for a while, you know it’s an unpredictable machine. This is one of the main reasons why you should work with the conditions available today rather than with the assumptions of what tomorrow’s conditions might be. Not even Google themselves manage to do that, after all.

Many talk about things that “should” happen, and sure, it’s interesting to speculate. The problem is that right here and now, we can only know for sure how things work at this very moment. Future-proofing is, of course, something we all need to think about, but what we should primarily focus on is driving profitable traffic today. Too many SEO bloggers today seem to only think about what may or may not happen a few years down the line. There’s a lot of talk about social signals, author rank, etc., which does not exist in Google’s algorithm today.

Sure, it might be beneficial to ensure your news site has author links, and it might be nice to have likes and retweets, but if that’s the core of your SEO strategy, you’re doing it wrong. It doesn’t yield anything today. Nothing. Investing in potential future SEO is as sensible as investing in future tulip bulbs. The value of that is highly uncertain and will, at best, yield returns sometime in the distant future. Putting all your money into scratch cards, in my opinion, is a better investment; at least you’ll get about half of it back, and fairly quickly compared to waiting for potential SEO gains.

How uncertain is the future in search results?

If you take a look at the image at the top, it shows Google’s own ranking for the keyword “Search Engine.” Google gave themselves a smack on the wrist on October 31st. Well deserved? Maybe, I don’t think they’ve done particularly aggressive link building except in a few cases, but the content can probably be described as thin, and they are well-known for a lot of ads above the fold.