SEO and Google’s Search Algorithm in 2015

4 SEO Factors that will Become Less Important Over Time

1.  Page Rank/Domain Authority: More authoritative (PR) sites will not (automatically) dominate search engines in the future as they often do today. Why?

Just because a website has a high page rank doesn’t mean it should automatically be given more love by a search engine. Giving too much credit to high Page Ranking sites is the classic example of “The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Get Poorer.”
To make an analogy, if SEO was a team sport today, based on the existing algorithms, almost all the starters would be the team veterans. And the rookies, despite their (potentially) superior abilities, would play much less– simply because they’re rookies. This, as you might imagine, makes no sense in the sports world and it shouldn’t happen in the world of SEO either—but it does, a LOT.

2. Site (Domain) Age: This goes hand-in-hand with Page Rank but it comes down to this: New and future websites should NOT be punished because they weren’t around during the golden age of SEO and search engines. This “first mover advantage” shouldn’t hold so much weight, but unfortunately, it does.

Take as an example my swimming pool company. Because we dominated search with our “They Ask, You Answer” content marketing philosophy starting in 2009, we now stand on top of the SEO mountain for our industry and it’s going to be very, very hard for anyone in the future to knock us off this mountain. That being said, if I were a new swimming pool company I would hate to be punished simply because my business didn’t exist during the early days of SEO.
Hopefully you see my point. This first mover advantage is flawed, as it punishes every new business going forward, and somehow, Google and the rest of the search engines are going to have to address this issue.

3. Social Signals: Many SEO pundits think social will play a bigger and bigger role on search rankings going forward. I do not share this belief. Sure, it may happen for a time, but eventually it will be eliminated because social shares can be too easily manipulated to make a piece of content “appear” worthy of a higher ranking. Furthermore, platforms like Facebook and Twitter come and go, which makes building metrics around said platforms problematic. And finally, because Google and Facebook are becoming massive competitors, do you really think Google will want any part of their algorithm to be impacted by a competitor??
4. Inbound Links (Backlinks): Although I think the number of Inbound Links/Backlinks a webpage has pointing to it will always be somewhat relevant to SEO, I foresee it becoming less and less of a factor. Why? For starters, it can be manipulated. Also, as stated above, inbound links favor older content, and as searchers seek out the “latest and greatest” info within any field, search engines will be forced to give less and less weight to inbound links in an effort to keep content as fresh and up to date as possible.