Current State of SEO (Specifically Google)

Hello all,

I was deep in SEO, which included white hat and black hat (I believe you need to wear both hats or at least know about ALL methods to make an educated choice for THAT specific project).

But as of late I tend to just pay someone to handle that headache....

In the past it was all about backlinks etc...but a lot of this stuff has changed recently with Google Algorythm changes.

Last I heard backlinks were still part of the game (High PR, variety, etc...) but not as rewarding...and recently Google introduced benefits for "answering questions".

...any SEO gurus want to comment on that?

Thanks in advance!

Well, it is not just by answering questions.. Humming Bird is an update which means that the web is going more into semantic, so data's are connected, and it mostly will affect the guys who have informative sites like in what year Obama's birthday is, and things like that.

Let's say we have a list of websites that have their data's published, they are basically triples example:

Obama - Birthday - 1940, so this is pretty intelligent because it exactly knows the birthday of Obama, and Google can find it easier by using the data's that are on DBpedia. So it is great.

But remember, web as we know, it doesn't matter if it is Google, bing facebook, all of them are going toward the semantic web, and there will be some changes during this period, but the commercial searches won't be touched, as it is hard to give someone who is looking for a product review, one favored search tending that the review is what they are looking for.

Fascinating. It looks like W3 is the body pushing this as a standard on the web.

Check this: [h=1]Semantic Web (http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/)[/h][h=1][/h]