SEO Updates in 2009

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. It is an ongoing process, which keeps on changing as per the search engine rules. Search engines are continuously working towards improving their search results to give accurate and relevant information to the users.

Some of the major updates in 2009 till now in SEO field are as follows.

1. Google improved flash indexing
Google improved its ability to index Flash Files, which are very popular on the Web but tricky for search engine spiders, by integrating integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.Google improved its ability to
* index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
* index all the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches. It will also discover URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into its crawling pipeline—just like Google do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages.
* Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
* Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2
* index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web

2. Google and other search engines announced support for a canonical link element that can help site owners with duplicate content issues.
A canonical tag is a simple piece of HTML code that you insert into the section of a duplicate page, letting the search engines know that they are on a duplicate page and they need to find the original content elsewhere, and guide them there. The tag itself looks something like this:

link rel="canonical" href="http://www.website.com/original-content.html"

By using the canonical tag, website developers can ensure search engines are seeing the original page (the parent page) and not numerous, identical, or almost identical pages – which could be possibly a sign of spam or take up valuable space in search results.

3. Regular PR and Backlink Updates

Everyone was expecting an Page rank update in the month of march, because usually a Google PageRank update occurs every three months. Finally the wait ended up in the first week of April. But this year Google gave two more surprises as Google danced similarly in the month of June and July which made a great impact on all the working strategies of SEO

4. Search Refinements and Snippets

There were three changes on the Google search result pages
1. The snippet length for the search results has increased.Google now displays an extended snippet of 3 lines for queries that consist of three or more keywords.
2. Google now shows more related searches at the bottom of the search results page.
3. Google now also shows local results based on IP addresses. The local results are delivered based on the IP address of the searcher. That means that you will get different results than people in another city.

5. Google Show Options
Google announced a new set of features called as Search/Show Options, which are a collection of tools that rearranges the result so that it can be viewed from different user’s perspectives.

6. Microsoft New Search Engine BING Launched
It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) to display refined versions of your query down the left side of the page. Bing gave a menu of "related searches," that included Walkthrough, News, and so on. Bing brings a new way of thinking to using SERPs, which has shown to demonstrably improve the satisfaction of searchers in finding the answers to their questions.

7. No More Page Rank Sculpting

PageRank sculpting is an SEO tactic that involves adding the nofollow attribute to links for which PageRank flow is not necessary. Early in 2005, the main search engines introduced a ‘nofollow’ attribute for the A HREF HTML command for coding hyperlinks.
Example:
Domain Name
pagerank sculpting used to be really effective around a year ago but Finally Matt Cutts announced in his blog that it’s not the most effective way to utilize your page rank and its not recommended.
8. Increased Importance of Social Media

With the continuing evolution of the Internet, and increased adoption of web 2.0 functionality, social media activities and discussions are going to take on a more important role in the eyes of a search engine. Social media has provided its users with unlimited opportunity to decide the relevancy of content. The financial downturn will encourage more marketing executives to turn to organic social media initiatives to drive awareness and interest. All in all, 2009 looks to be a year of significant growth for social media. Discussion forums have built the trust in the eyes of Google. It’s really not a surprise now if forum threads are been displayed in Google’s 1st page of SERP.

9. Webmaster “Summer Shine”

The Google Webmaster Tools team has code names for its new update as "Summer Shine".
Here are a few highlights:
* site selector now lists all verified sites that you own, and allows you to search as you type.
* You can now block non-homepage sitelinks. Before last July, if you owned example.com, you couldn't block sitelinks for example.com/email.
* You can now see URL removal requests submitted by other users for any sites you own, and revoke them if necessary. In the past, if another webmaster for your site mistakenly removed a URL on your site and left for vacation it was a difficult process to undo the request.
* Google Home" page is now much easier to navigate. It now make a clear distinction between verified and unverified sites.

10. Google’s Caffeine

On 10th August Google ask people to help and test there next generation infrastructure. This change was made to improve indexing capability, speed and accuracy of the search results.
Google has provided a preview of the new infrastructure at www2.sandbox.google.com and invited web developers to try searches there.
This is an experiment by Google and Matt Cutt said that the Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: Google is rewriting the foundation of some of their infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so they wanted to open up a preview so that searchers and web developers could give them feedback. They only want feedback on the differences between Google’s current Search results and there new system.
Here’s How to give them feedback.
Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says "Dissatisfied? Help us improve." Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box.