Search Engines Trend Thursday, Nov 2 2006 

Since there is no accounting for taste, the search engine needs to base on what one likes in oder to understand what is beautiful.

Therefore, it should come natural to talk about traffic and links, but I prefer to surprise you and divert the topic onto somenthing less visible, less tangible and perhaps, something existing only in my perverse mind: search engines trend.

Let’s start right away, with a little example.
Let’s suppose we are today creating a site dealing with a nonexistent subject and basing on nonexistent keywords. Even though Google is not a semantic search engine, it generally attaches a correlation between keywords of the same sector in order to understand what a site is talking about and whether this site has the right or not to be at the top of a certain SERP. It is basically the same principle of query expansion that has been discussed for a while. Giorgio Taverniti explained it very well , not very technically perhaps, but in a way that is clear to unexperienced SEOs, too. It should be specified, though, that query expansion is not a tool meant for SEOs, it is rather a tool allowing search engines to correlate more topics.

As in the case of BackLinks, the existence of both a visible correlation (the one we get by using the code ~ before the query) and an invisible correlation is likely to be supposed. In any case, both the former and the latter must establish the pertinence degree a web page has, compared to a certain query or at least compared to a certain subject.

Just to avoid empty theories and provide some tools useful for ranking, I recommend to all query expansion lovers to use clusty.com. For those who don’t know what I am talking about, clusty is a search engine basing on keyword clustering. Therefore, unlike Google & Co., it stands a bit closer to a semantic search engine, at least as far as the consistency of its results is concerned.

I personally use this search engine for query expansion. I will now explain how to do it, but, since it is very simple, I reckon you will grasp it immediately. Search for the keyword you are interested in with clusty.com (for example, I am searching for the word Fashion) and look to your left. Clusty will provide a list of Topics, believed to be correlated to that specific query.

In my case, it thought appropriate to correlate the query fashion to the following keywords (Subjects):

• Fashion Week (32)
• Clothing (35)
• Magazine (27)
• Photography (22)
• Beauty (18)
• Schools, Design (14)
• Women’s (11)
• Models (11)
• Fashion industry (10)
• Dress (9)

Every Topic can be expanded and the related keywords can be further extended: we are talking about a very useful tool, if used properly and especially if used together with a tool for Keyword Suggestion as the SEO Book and the classical dictionary of synonims and antonyms.

So, now that I have provided you with something practical you can use as you like, let’s go back to the main topic: what does this have to do with Search Engines Trend?

In the first example, you were told to assume you are creating a site dealing with a totally new subject, with new keywords and a slang slightly different from the one used by other sites in the same language: it is possible to think that this first site will affect the Trend of the new SERPS it is creating, by suggesting to the search engine the opportunity of correlating certain keywords with others belonging to the same sector.

Therefore, it is possible to suppose there are algorithms whose task is managing Search Engines Trend. Likewise, we can also assume it is these algorithms that provide Google with much information, such as information about topic, language and “level of spam“. We are talking about information created both onPage and offPage, through both page contents and the links to the page. In other words, the idea of language, topic and spam are not stable in the search engine, they actually may undergo a slight change through onPage and offPage factors. So, after the creation of the word SEO, this term is now part of various languages and certain subjects such as: marketing, google, msn, yahoo, webmaster, internet, blog and so on.

What I am stating is that a search engine should not be thought of as a classifying tool based on a certain idea of language, topic, and so on. A search engine is a tool undergoing deep changes, as Trends change. So for example developing new technologies may upset your SERPs because it generally involves both an interest shift and the development of new related terms.

Besides: The flapping of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas.