Google and SEO in 2008

One of the blog on my feeds is Blogstorm, an SEO expert from UK. A short about us taken from his site :

With in excess of 100,000 monthly visitors BlogStorm is one of the UK’s largest internet marketing blogs.
BlogStorm is written by Patrick Altoft, a consultant specialising in social media and search engine optimisation.

He mentioned something worth thinking about on “How Google Will Change SEO in 2008“. Though it might seems like an issue that doesn’t affect us small time bloggers, I think it is wise we know what kind of wave will hit us and how we can ride the wave.

Before I go on, I must say that there are hundreds of SEO gurus out there and not every word they say is the gospel truth. One of the things that we small time bloggers ought to remember is not to become a fanboi of any of them. Being fanboi means you are blinded by the facts and only listen and blindly believe whatever they say. Thereafter, these fanbois will act like zombies, following their words and strictly their words only.

For a start, I wouldn’t go near SEO gurus who cannot differentiate between ‘their’ and ‘there’. Funny thing is there are a few of them and oh boy, are they loud!

Back to Blogstorm, the author has written many articles that are very informative. In particular, he analyse what kind of outlook can webmasters expect in 2008. This is the part that bloggers have to accept :

2008 will be the year that this crackdown really starts to have an effect on the sites that consumers see when they perform searches on Google.

Google is getting better and better at detecting paid links. They have removed the ability for thousands of sites to pass PageRank and even reduced the ability of some sites to rank for their own names. 2008 will see every site that continues to publicly sell links receive harsh penalties in both search engine rankings and PR passing ability.

Read the rest of his post on How Google Will Change SEO in 2008.

Bottomline – Get back your PR if your blog means something to you and bear with the dry phase until something else comes along. I have written to a few paid post companies and asked if they allow no-follow links and nope, they don’t. So, if we keep writing, Google will somehow get to us. It is a no-win situation.

Now, I know people are talking about Izearanks. I wouldn’t place my blogs there if I am you. Why? You never know what Google may pick up. I know I am dead paranoid but after losing my PR and gaining it back, I am so protective of my three blogs now. Courtney Tuttle’s warning that Google may pick up our SocialSpark’s code also still frightened me until I dare not even place the code here. Muahahar…are you scared yet?

BTW, I experienced some downtime and will be moving to a dedicated server sometime this weekend.