Rankings Aren’t What They Used to Be

This post comes to us from the BoomTown blog:

Since the beginning, rankings and SEO have gone hand in hand. Back in the early 2000s, it made sense; you want to rank for "this keyword," "that keyword," etc. You write relevant content with relevant anchor text, get links and then use a variety of SEO ranking tools to track your position. Rankings were black and white back then, but like just about everything related to the Internet, things have changed [for the good].

Two big events have taken place that have changed the landscape and how we use (and don't use) rankings:

1. Personalized Search - If you and I search for the same exact query, chances are slim that our page one results will be the same. Read more on personalized search below.
2. The tools - Many companies with SEO tools have decided it's too risky to provide a ranking tool using unauthorized and scraped Google data. So even if we wanted the data, it's not as readily available as it used to be and it may be more outdated than we're comfortable with.

I personally love to see the trend of moving away from rankings. Going in this direction is forcing both companies and individuals to focus on what's important, which is writing content that's unique and appealing to real people. I also believe this trend will drive people to look at metrics that more accurately represent value.

If you're ranked number 1 for a query and get 1,000 visits from that particular article, but the bounce rate is 90% and the average time is less than 10 seconds, there's very little value in what just happened. I'd rather Google serve my article to a more qualified searcher even if that means I only get 100 visits, but a bounce rate of 20% and a time on site of eight minutes.