It depends on your strategy. Google isn’t the only way to bring traffic to a blog, and if SEO isn’t your thing you have plenty of methods to choose from, but it will take a long time for the old SEO to become obsolete. It has evolved, not transformed.

You may be right, Arthur, but I sure hope not.

If what you say is going to be important in 2014 is, then I sure hope my novels take off because I don’t want to keep wasting my time writing copy that’s just rubbish.

I mean, how long are we going to continue to have this negative and self-defeatist attitude that the search engines are the boss and people aren’t?

Mainly the problem is we think our readers are stupid. No, then why do we treat them like they were 5th graders?

Until we decide that we’re not going to be affected by machines but by people, swayed not by search but by user sentiments, and that sometimes being number 1 is worse than not appearing at the top of Google at all we’ll continue to see an internet full of rubbish.

Google’s the king of the hill, sure, but no one can stay in that lofty perch forever. I stopped writing for them a long time ago, and I suggest you do the same.

Wonderful and well-written article, Damien. However I got to disagree with the “that’s how it is done…”

On my blog, while guest-blogging and anywhere else I am allowed to spit my nonsense, my motto is ‘if a human being can figure out that you’re trying to cheat, then assume Google can too.’

In a way this resonates with the content of your article. Writing high-quality content for human beings and putting in passion, effort, action, competence and effectiveness in whatever gets published on the web is a sure bet to survive future Google updates.

However, on the other had, thinking that this alone is enough in today’s search-engine scenario is delusional. Possibly it will make sense when the scary, sentient cube, which you describe in your article, comes into being. However, in 2013-2014, links, PR, keyword research, dofollow and nofollow remain crucial to get at the top of Google.

We might be moving towards sentient search-engine algos, but we’re not there yet. The older factors are still there. If one doesn’t take those into account (along with the quality, authorship and anything else you mention), there will be someone else who will and those will be the people who rank number one.

But as a google searcher I am finding that the results are being gamed more than ever – it’s just this time round it’s people who are happy to be profiled by google that are winning. And in my experience google results are getting a lot worse.

So now those who are keen to self-promote will win, and those small business owners who provide an excellent service but don’t have the money, means or desire to spend their time on social media will fail.

And the privacy issue is huge. Now we know they are creating huge databases profiling people (including opinions, facial recognition through google+ images) and punishing people who don’t comply with lower seo rankings. It’s pretty outrageous. It’s not as if they are exactly trustworthy when it comes to our data.

This is not a benign development even though it helps those with high profiles in social media; it’s actually very creepy indeed.

Usually I make a point of not even reading the endless posts about what Google have done with their next algorithm.

… but I do like to drop in and read some Copyblogger posts from time to time.

Isn’t the point not</me? to try and follow the system but just to write the content you know you should be writing and trust Google to do what they do best?

I always find it interesting how fast our world is changing and how this is changing our interactions with it (e.g. how big data impacts our lives)

The reasoning behind the change is: Google wants to allow for longer search strings, and specifically, for users to be more conversational with the way they interact with a site. Not to focus on keywords.