Here we go again! Google’s one-and-only Matt Cutts has made some socking announcements at the SES Conference in San Francisco recently. The fact of the matter is, if you thought you have seen the worst of Penguin Updates (Penguin 3.9), get ready for a new roll of updates! Matt quotes, “the hotly awaited Penguin refresh is due out imminently!”. So what will it be this time Big G? Will we see a seismic shake down of “Low Quality Content Sites”, or will we awake to a massive PR drop? Will this be Penguin 4.0, or will the Google Knowledge Graph play a factor in these updates?
Another question buzzing around the SEO world is the Focus on Social Signals? Since we all know that Google has announced the recognition and relevancy of Social Signals, will we see the Big G make a move from a search engine to diverse content provider? When Matt Cutts was asked, “what does the Knowledge Graph do?”, the reply was, ” It allows users to run searches for people, places, or things that Google has stored in its database. This could range from heavenly bodies to far off vacation spots, historical events to upcoming movies, and everything in between”.
What really confuses me about the Social Signals and the implementation of the Google Knowledge Graph, is that if Google intends to expand, redefine and provide deeper content for your searches, and Google has admitted the relevancy of Social Signals, then are they almost forcing us to Google+?
Is Google forcing users away from the “Organic Results” and solely focusing the user on “Suggested Results”? IF that is the case, then how will Google pull the sugested results? Not from Facebook, Google is blocked from accessing Facebook’s internal database and can not crawl Facebook Pages. Nor can Google crawl the Pages of Twitter due to Twitter is a private service and can cancel a user account at any time. What other Social Media source is left, oh that’s right, there is always Google+………..
So what will we see in the next few weeks? Will Social Signals play a huge impact on the awaited update, or will will the Google blow us away with something totally new?
(Reference SiteReference.com – http://site-reference.com/articles/cutts-reveals-slew-of-google-changes-at-ses-conference/)
(Reference Matt Cutts – Google Webmaster Blog – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html)
By: Brandyn Garske