Danny Sullivan, Chief Content Officer and Founding Editor of Marketing Land and Search Engine Land, speaks about past, present, and future trends in search engines and discusses how to optimize your company's website for Google, Bing, and mobile devices.

1. BIGGEST
SEARCH STORY
OF THE
YEAR SO FAR?
BIGGEST
SEARCH STORY
OF THE
YEAR SO FAR?
Trends In Search #MKTGNATION14

2. SURPRISE: GOOGLE IS STILL
HUGE
Google
68%
Bing
19%
Yahoo
10%
Others
3%
Market Share
source: ComScore, June 2014
Desktop searches
Read: Yahoo Search Share Falls Below
10 Percent For “All-Time Low”
17.8 billion explicit core searches total

3. SO LET’S TALK GOOGLE…
 SEO developments
 Knowledge Graph & quick answers
 Google+ dead or alive?
 Beyond Google:
changes that mobile is bringing
 Q&A on anything

4. PANDA? PENGUIN?
HUMMINGBIRD?
 Is Google out to get people with all these
animal actions?
 And what are these animal actions?
 The goal is really to improve search results
because ultimately, Google works for
searchers not publishers
 Behind the zoo….

5. PANDA: TARGETING THIN
CONTENT
 Launched Feb. 2011,
designed to keep
low-quality or “thin”
content from ranking
 Roughly every month,
Google filters everything
though Panda to trap new
stuff & free others
 Focus on real quality to survive
(always the answer for any search success)

6. PENGUIN: TARGETING SPAM
 Launched April 2012,
meant to fight spam,
especially bad links
 Every six month or so,
Google filters everything
though Penguin to find
spam regular systems miss
 Don’t think link building;
think audience building….

7. LINK RULE INSANITY
 Paid links have long been warned against…
 But more complicated as native advertising
and native ads have grown
 Widgets get popular, so Google warns against them
 Infographics get popular, so Google warns against them
 Guest posting gets popular, so Google warns against
“blogging for links”
 Feels safer now not to link to anyone or to “nofollow”
everything
 Feels insane Google punishes for bad links rather than simply
discounts credit

8. HUMMINGBIRD: THE NEW SEARCH
ENGINE
 Announced in Sept. 2013,
this is an entire rebuild of
Google’s search engine
 Panda, Penguin are just
parts of that engine
 The new engine can better
tap into “signals” or “fuel”
to rank results
 A major change is improved support for
“entities” and “entity search”

9. ENTITIES & ENTITY SEARCH
 Google (and Bing) are
learning to search not
just for matching
patterns of letters
but people, places
and things
 A search for “obama” in the past would look for
those letters in that order
 With entity search, Obama is understood as a
person that can be connected to other people and
various facts….

11. FACTS & KNOWLEDGE GRAPH
GROWTH
Read: Google's Knowledge Graph

12. GROWTH OF QUICK/DIRECT
ANSWERS
Read:
Tweet Showing How Google Itself Is A “Scraper Site” Goes Massively Viral

13. GROWTH OF QUICK/DIRECT
ANSWERS
Read:
Google’s Knowledge Graph Is Showing Step By Step Instructions

14. LOCAL SEARCH & THE
CAROUSEL
Read: Google Local Carousel Spinning Out Of Control
What Matters?

15. NEW: PIGEON, NEW LOCAL SEARCH
ALGO
 Revealed last week,
designed to improve
local search results
 Factors still being
analyzed but makes
review directories like
Yelp, TripAdvisor stronger
 Integrates web search ranking factors
(such as links) along with Knowledge Graph
data & local search factors (distance, ratings)
Read:
Google “Pigeon” Updates Local Search Algorithm

16. WHAT ABOUT GOOGLE+ BEING DEAD?
 Exec change in April
led to rumors/leaks
(which Google denies)
that Google+ would die
 More likely social sharing
site continues but
“Google+ification” of
YouTube & elsewhere will ease up
 Authorship images already dropped
 But use of social signals for personalized
rankings continues….
Read: Google+ Will Not Die But May Change &
What Would Happen If Google Did Kill Google+?

17. THERE ARE NO NORMAL RESULTS

18. MOVING ON TO MOBILE
 Everyone’s talking about a “mobile first” world
 You don’t need a mobile site to rank better,
but…
 A site with problems for smartphone searches
on Google may not rank as well
 More important: knowing how to react in
“Always On” mobile search world….

19. SEARCHING ON THE MOVE

20. CALLS NOT CLICKS: YOU
READY?

21. WHAT ABOUT GOOGLE+ BEING DEAD?
 Click-to-call?
 Mobile-
friendly
version
of site?
 App for repeat visitors?
Read: Google+ Will Not Die But May Change &
What Would Happen If Google Did Kill Google+?

22. THE NEXT SEO FRONTIER?THE NEXT SEO FRONTIER?
via: Kerry Dean, SMX Advanced June 2014

23. Google Now Sending
Searches to Apps
“we’re expanding
it to work for English
content worldwide.
And we’re including
24 more apps…
THE NEXT SEO FRONTIER?THE NEXT SEO FRONTIER?
via: Kerry Dean, SMX Advanced June 2014
– Google Search Blog Apr. 3, 2014

24. PREDICTIVE SEARCH
GROWING
Read: Google Now –
When Google Searches Before You Think To

25. MICROSOFT HAS IT, TOO
Read: Cortana, Microsoft’s Predictive
Search Challenger To Google Now & Siri

26. THE WEARABLE SEARCH
 Notifications on
your phone
 On your wrist
 And even in
your eyes…

30. WHERE WEARABLES MAY GO
 People may not flock to
Glass but nearly half like
idea of smartwatches
 “Agents” like Google Now
& Cortana getting smarter
at predicting our search
needs
 Stay tuned; location
“gating” likely key in future

31. TAKEAWAYS / Q&A
 Quality content rules, so invest for the long-term
 Build an audience, not links
 Search is shifting from keywords to concepts;
be that concept, that entity, esp. through structured data
 Surviving shift to direct answers means being the
essential answer; can Google live without you?
 Search will continue to get personalized, social likely a
key factor, so be social
 Are you thinking about the mobile visitor with your landing
pages?
 Predictive search, wearables mean new opportunities

32. BIGGEST
SEARCH STORY
OF THE
YEAR SO FAR?
BIGGEST
SEARCH STORY
OF THE
YEAR SO FAR?