Every time Google updates its core search engine code it spoils the day for website owners and search engine optimizers alike as they all race to see what the impact will be. This time is no different. Google Caffeine has been implemented though the update is not likely to be complete until the beginning of 2010 by which time there will be a jump in trade in valium as website owners and anyone else active in SEO try to get their nerves under control. 

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It’s true that a rolling stone gathers no moss, and Google have elevated the old saying into an art form. In the past eighteen months the company has been active in search, mobile phones, a new programming language called Go designed to make web servers run faster, a bevy of free online tools, modifications and improvements to their Gmail and Google Docs accounts, the rolling out of Google wave (albeit still in Beta), modifications and improvements in Google Analytics and, since it’s already so near Christmas, a partridge on a pear tree.

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In the SEO landscape things are exactly what you expect: Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the park and getting with it is getting harder and harder and Yahoo! and MSN, which is now BING, have been left fighting over the crumbs. Except things are not quite so rock-steady. The SEO world is still a nascent one which means there is fluidity which can explode from one moment to the next, permanently changing its geography.

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If you are working online you already know that the success of your site depends upon the quality of the team handling your search engine optimisation (SEO). I say team because as of February 2009 the complexity and time-intensive nature of search engine optimisation required to make a website work makes it unfeasible for its owners to handle it correctly and still run their online company and enjoy any kind of offline life.

In the world of search engine optimisation 2009 is going to be a colourful year because of a few percentage points. Before I explain this let’s go and look at the percentage points which are going to make SEO engineers and website owners alike lose hours of sleep and much of the quality of life for the rest of the year.

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The question when it comes to search dominance is literally a $4.34 billion one, which is the amount of profit Google reported from advertising search revenue on a turnover of $22.1 billion last year. The profit alone is more than the GDP of Congo and Zimbabwe combined which probably puts Google on the world’s economies list ahead of most of Africa and Eastern Europe on a par with some of Europe’s economies. 

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Microsoft gets so rarely the chance to feature its name prominently beside the words ‘search technology’ that I feel guilty already for belittling  their efforts before they have had a proper chance to unveil their new search engine which may be called Bing and has, during development, being known as Kumo. 

Now we have written about Microsoft’s search engine woes here before and there is the risk of making the software giant the whipping boy of the online search industry and that is not right, but we should never let its deep coffers and perseverance blind us to the faults in its approach either.

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As I am writing this the million dollar question in the world of search engine optimization is: “Will the semantic web ever happen?”. The answer is of more than just purely academic value. On it hinges the future of the SEO industry and the success of your website.

Semantic indexing is the name given to a family of techniques for searching and organizing large data collections. The goal of semantic indexing is to find patterns in unstructured data (documents without descriptors such as keywords or special tags, websites and web pages) and use those patterns to offer more effective search and categorization services.

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The moment we put the words Google and update in the same sentence you can bet that website owners’ and webmasters’ blood pressure begins to go through the roof and search engine optimizers lose sleep over what is going to happen in the Google-dominated online search world.

Google has become the only viable option of getting organic traffic to your site for the majority of websites throughout the world and, as a result, every organic technique aimed at helping a legitimate website become optimized in order to perform better, attracts widespread abuse which has Google search algorithm writers and search engine optimizers engaged in a cat-and-mouse game where the one side tries to filter excessive abuse and the other tries to make sure that their clients are getting their money’s worth.

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