This week the Wall Street Journal included a piece about the Executive Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt. Schmidt has written a book, due to be launched in April 2013, entitled “The New Digital Age”. As well as discussing China and its involvement with internet censorship he touches on some other interesting subjects such as the future of Googles rankings, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Schmidt suggests that privacy will be marginalised on the internet with anonymity ceasing to exist. He also goes on to say that government will also require online verification. You may or may not agree with his predictions but it is very interesting to gain an insight into what senior figures within Google believe is the course that we are heading on.
This is what he has to say about Google “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
Google uses Google+ profiles as a method of verifying ownership of online content and we can expect to see profiles attached to future search results with increasing visibility.
Google has a clear vested interest in ensuring that the relevancy of its search engine results are as good as possible. Those that attempt to manipulate search results using questionable techniques are likely at best to achieve short-term results or at worst find their sites blacklisted. So here we have a very clear indication that authorship is likely to influence future search engine rankings with an emphasis on quality content. The importance of content marketing is therefore set to grow and ensuring that this is underpinned by a sound content strategy we believe is paramount.
The Mackman approach to website development, content marketing and search engine optimisation is very closely aligned and on a parallel course to that indicated by Google.