Recently, Search Engine Land wrote an article that asked some of the SEO industry’s heavy hitters what they think the next trends will be in the SEO world. Some great experts contributed, including Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Barry Schwartz and many more.
The general tone from their outlooks was cautiously positive, and most were excited for the changes that they could foresee, it most likely has to do with the inevitability of change.
Inspired by this article (there is overlap) here are some of my predictions for SEO in 2015:
- Exact keywords lose some importance
- Google is taking exact keyword match away from AdWords and allowing close variations.
- The increase in semantic understanding of content, context and the quality of the work is becoming more important than exact keyword integration
- Negative SEO will become a real threat
- As Google increases penalties for link fraud, black hat SEO (the dark side of the industry) tactics will allow targeted SEO attacks on competing businesses.
- As the onus to track and understand all of the links that are directed to your site is on the site owner and not Google, disavowing links will become more important than ever.
- Individuals will play a larger role in how content ranks
- Author authority will play a larger role in the ranking of content, with authoritative authors outranking less prominent authors.
- It is officially time to dust off the Google+ profile, link to sites that you contribute to, and add authorship to all of your content.
Do you have any predictions for the near future of SEO? Let us know you top prediction in the comments section.