In the last six weeks, 3 unique events have led me to conclude that this post is essential. We, as search marketers, need to understand not just the small changes the engines have been making in Q4 '08, but what that signals as a broader direction. I'll start by recounting those events:

#1 - More Ads in the SERPs (and other places)

• http://searchengineland.com/google-ads-for-hard-alcohol-and-liqueurs-now-allowed-15756.php
• http://searchengineland.com/google-expands-adsense-for-domains-enough-already-15812.php
• http://searchengineland.com/google-search-suggest-get-ads-links-answers-15821.php
• http://searchengineland.com/googles-countdown-to-2009-promotes-products-services-15849.php
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/05/yahoo-testing-ways-to-make-those-search-ads-pop/

#2 - Yahoo!'s Expansion of their "Open" Strategy & BOSS

• http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-enhances-open-strategy-mail-my-yahoo-toolbar-more-15845.php
• http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10118008-93.html
• http://news.cnet.com/2300-1038_3-6248414-1.html

#3 - Google's SERPs Enhancements & Modifications

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html
• http://searchengineland.com/google-testing-enhanced-listings-pagelinks-auto-spelling-correction-15819.php
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/new-search-by-style-options-for-google.html

It's hard to describe these phenomenon as "related" or even philosophically cohesive, but it feels like a shift. While that's not very scientific, I'm bolstered by the supporting thoughts of colleagues like Mike Grehan, one of the search marketing industry's smartest and most experienced players. Here's Mike in his latest thought paper:

We're essentially trying to force elephants into browsers that don't want them. The browser that Sir Tim Berners Lee invented, along with HTML and the HTTP protocol, was intended to render text and graphics on a page delivered to your computer via a dial‐up modem, not to watch movies like we do today. Search engine crawlers were developed to capture text from HTML pages and analyze links between pages, but with so much information outside the crawl, is it the right method for an always‐on, ever‐demanding audience of self producers?

You can download the remarkably insightful paper - New Signals to Search Engines - from Acronym Media's site and read more, but my big takeaways dovetailed closely with Mike's. There's a new generation of search coming, and we're finally getting a more tangible glimpse of what that future has in store for us.

Danny Sullivan likes to say that we're in Search 3.0, heading for 4.0, and his breakdown goes something like this:

• Search 1.0 - keywords & text
• Search 2.0 - link analysis
• Search 3.0 - integration of vertical results
• Search 4.0 - personalization

I think the search future we're facing has elements of all of these, but it has an additional component that's been part of the "Web 2.0" movement since the very beginning: participation. Right now, the world's leading engines seem like they're all trying to figure out how to become Korea's Naver. Google's tried Groups & Orkut & Lively (without much success). Yahoo!'s tried MyYahoo!, Answers, Mash & 360 (arguably with a few more "hits" than Google). Now Google's on to SearchWiki and Yahoo!'s trying OPEN.

I seriously doubt that either of these will be the "future of search," but I do believe very much that web search's signals are going to involve more than keywords, links, vertical results and personalization. I think we're going to see the hive mind - the "wisdom of crowds" - become part of the engines' algorithms at some point in the very near future. In Danny's model, this might be a Search 5.0, but I think, to a certain extent, personalization, vertical integration and this new crowd sourcing are all a part of the same movement.

Rather than argue about the slight differences in conceptualizing (especially since the leading minds all seem to have a lot of underlying consensus), I'd rather do what I always do - think about how this impacts search marketers. Mike Grehan did a great job of that in his paper:

Signals from end users who previously couldn't vote for content via links from web pages are now able to vote for content with their clicks, bookmarks, tags and ratings. These are very strong signals to search engines, and best of all, they don't rely on the elitism of one web site owner linking to another or the often mediocre crawl of a dumb bot.

Although Mike had lots of smart things to say in the piece, this was perhaps my favorite. He's distilled the essence of what's happening in the search world - engines shifting, however slowly (and yes, even though it might seem like the sky is always falling, I do think these shifts are years in the works), to adopting additional metrics and data sources to make their results higher and higher quality. If you study the technology of algorithms, you've apparently known for years that more data usually beats better algorithms, so it's not surprise that the engines are trying to discover any data source they can for potential application.

My question is does more data, and in particular this kind of data, change what SEOs need to do to succeed for their sites and clients?

Not really. At least, not if you're a smart, long-term focused SEO.

Sure, if you've been playing the spam/arbitrage/manipulation game, even in the lightest gray hat sense, you could be in for an ugly surprise. But, if you've been building a business intelligently and focusing on not just your raw search rankings, but customer fulfillment, branding, participation and word-of-mouth marketing, these changes are going to be a net positive. Why? Because more data means the engines know more about you and about your visitors - they can see which sites attract lots of repeat visits, which ones have loyal customers, and which ones are succeeding in not just satisfying, but delighting their audience. Those are the sites we should all be building and they're also the sites the engines want to reward.

At the end of the day, the best results are the best sites. The technology the engines have now rewards a very select subset of web properties who have success with two rankings signals: good keyword targeting and good (or lots of moderate to crappy) links. More data collection means more opportunity to win, even if your site doesn't conform flawlessly to these signals, and a better chance that if these are the only indicators you're winning, you could be in big trouble. I still believe we're years (3-5) away from an SEO economy where links don't play the primary role (and I doubt we can ever get away from keywords - that's search at its most basic), but I do agree that we're plodding slowly down that path.

BTW - Blogging on SEOmoz will likely be limited over the next 2 weeks, but we'll try to have some new material to welcome in the New Year.