Have you heard? You can test the new google at www2.sandbox.google.com. Supposedly, this new search engine is faster and more relevant to search queries. I just looked around and it seemed like digg and social bookmarks were ranking higher on this search engine.

Seems like SEO’s will have to have to develop some different strategies, but as far as I can tell it’s not THAT much of a difference. Some may lose rank when this search engine is deployed, and some may gain rank. For some, it may not even make a difference.

Seems interesting, anyway. I’m not all that worried about the change myself, I checked and a lot of my sites seem to be ranking in the new engine, some even better than in the current version of Google.

I was just doing a little reading and stumbled on this post: http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-profiles-seo-as-criminals/

Just because people want to get traffic to their website, they’re most definitely criminals. I mean, legitimate people don’t want anyone to actually read what they write These guys using permalinks on their blog and optimizing for keywords in their post are all criminals. Oh yes and building links with the keyword in the anchor text is also criminal activity

This really doesn’t surprise me coming from Google. In a way, I see where they’re coming from, there is a lot of garbage at the top of the search engine results for some keywords and buried down deep is really great content that barely anyone finds. Highly popular websites or websites that exercise SEO rank at the top, that’s just the way it is. Doesn’t mean they have the best content, just means they have the best SEO.

So yea, if you want to get your content read by people you HAVE to exercise SEO. That’s just the way it is. I sort of wonder what would happen if no one bothered with SEO, what sites would get to the top? Most likely just the popular sites, ones with a large following since they would (and do) get plenty of backlinks for every post they write.

Personally, I exercise a very limited amount of SEO on this site since I’m not worried about traffic. I’m just sort of letting this one go naturally. The Google algorithm is probably the strangest thing I’ve ever encountered though, with pagerank, google dancing, keywords, backlinks, the “google sandbox”, etc. It’s all in good fun though

Side Note: You may have noticed I’ve thrown out nofollow linking, I’m just going to keep links in plain text for right now or dofollow when I feel that page is worthy or needs to receive a link. I am thinking about removing website URL from the comments as well, but I’m not sure yet.