A couple of days ago I was giving a presentation on chatbot building and the business opportunities that they represent (also the subject of a free chatbot course I created).

I was very fortunate to have an engaged audience that asked many great questions. One of which is particularly relevant to this blog. An attendee asked, “What is the impact of chatbots on SEO?”.

What’s the impact of chatbots on SEO?

My answer was that chatbots are so new it’s unlikely Google has already put algorithmic changes in place that are specifically targeted at chatbots.

All we have to go by are the SEO rules we already know. From these rules, we can deduct the likely impact of chatbots on SEO.

Google does not interrogate chatbots like a human would, in order to crawl their content. So you should have the same information available on the site in traditional pages as well.

Provided you do that, chatbots are a net positive because they increase engagement and time on page, while lowering bounce rates.

All great signals of a quality site, which Google will reward with better rankings in the result pages.

How do you future-proof your blog for Google?

The question, and the answer I developed on the fly, led me to consider the more general question of how to future-proof sites against Google’s constant algorithm changes.

Google fine tunes its algorithm with minor updates hundreds of times per year. Once in a while they’ll roll out major updates that drastically change results and in the process impact millions of site owners.

You might be familiar with classic updates such as Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird.

We can predict the future with a higher degree of accuracy if we first study the past.

The general trend that Google has shown over the years has been “serving the end user”. They have increasingly rewarded sites that provided value to the user, and penalized those that did not.

For example, Google loves long content because it is more likely to provide the answer that the user is looking for, or to inform them thoroughly on a given topic.

When users click on a result and stay on the site for a long time, it’s an indication that the site has something valuable to offer to the user.

Speed helps the user. A responsive design that works well on mobile phones and tablets helps the user.

Artificially repeating the same keyword the user searched for 50 times on the page does not help the user in any way. This so-called “keyword stuffing” approach worked when Google’s ranking algorithm was much simpler, but today it’s something that will actually penalize your site.

Do what’s best for the user

Your North Star, and the only way to future-proof your blog against Google’s algorithm changes is to do right by your readers. When making a choice that could affect rankings down the line, ask yourself, how will this help my users?

It would be very uncharacteristic of Google to penalize you for helping your users further. If anything, you are likely to be rewarded to a greater degree for this, as the algorithm becomes even more intelligent and refined.

At any rate, it’s the right thing to do, so do it anyway and trust that Google will take notice in the future.

The post How to Future-Proof Your Blog Against Google’s Algorithm Changes appeared first on Technical Blogging.

It all started with Google’s attempt to steer their huge ship towards the mythical land of all things Social. You see, Facebook’s success really took a few giant tech companies by surprise. Google in particular. Surely, they thought to themselves, we must be able to compete.

So instead of focusing on their core competency, they decided to start throwing Social everywhere. It showed up in their search results. It was pushed down your Gmail throat. You had to have a Google+ account to use Google’s services in any capacity. UI and accounts got more and more confusing. YouTubers weren’t spared either.

Oh, and they wanted your real name, like Facebook. If you are secretly transgender or wanted by the Iranian government, tough luck, kiddo. (The relative lack of Social success and massive protests have eventually led them to change their initial policy.)

So what does this circus has to do with the RSS feed? Well, when you’re wearing Social blinders, that’s all you can see. They discontinued most of their services that couldn’t be adopted to this narrow world view.

Google Reader, the first successful attempt at making RSS feeds somewhat mainstream, was shut down. Instead of this handy service that was already loved by millions around the world, they wanted you to share articles on their social network. Follow people, put them in circles, and generally pretend you were on Facebook. There, they figured, no need to properly follow a feed with the purpose of never missing a new article. Good stuff will bubble up to the surface. Hopefully.

To round things off, they also got rid of the RSS button in Chrome so that finding the feed for a site is now a decent first exercise in learning HTML programming for the general public.

These two simple steps by Google have pretty much mortally wounded the RSS feed. It won’t recover I’m afraid and it’s a damn shame. A minority of geeks will continue to use the technology via services like Feedly, but the mainstream dream is gone.

All for a social network that relatively few people use, let alone in any serious capacity (at least in part because Google stubbornly refuses to open their API to allow third-party apps, like Buffer and Hootsuite, to post on people’s own profiles).

If you think I’m just talking hypothetically, think again. I saw one of my blogs go from a healthy 16,000 RSS subscribers to less than 300 in the span of just a month or so after this change was made (many, including my wife, who is a popular blogger in her field, witnessed the same sort of abrupt, brutal nosedive with her RSS numbers as well).

From a blogger’s perspective, this irreversible change has some serious implications:

1. Email subscriptions have never been more important. Unlike Facebook subscribers or Twitter followers who will rarely see your updates, emails are still being read and given a certain importance by the subscriber (Google is trying to mess this up too, but that’s a whole other post). You need to capture people’s email as it’s the only guaranteed delivery method for your updates that you have. (On that note, you can subscribe here.)
2. Feel free to maximize your social media properties and efforts, engage and entertain users, but have an email subscription as your ultimate call to action.
3. For the sake of us geeks who are unwilling to give up the good fight, do be sure to prominently feature an RSS feed link/button on your blog or site.
4. If your audience is not technical, consider having a ‘How to follow this blog’ link with step-by-step instructions on using Feedly or Bloglovin (the latter of which is particularly popular among women).

It’s an unfortunate turn of events that has damaged blogging in an untold number of ways. Thankfully, it hasn’t killed things off entirely though, especially if we are willing to adapt.

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