User and useful have the same root: use. And a user finds useful a website when it offers an answer to her needs, and if its use is easy and fast..

From the point of view that Google has of User, that means that a site to rank:

1. must be fast;
2. must have useful content and related to what it pretends to be about;
3. must be presented to Google so that it can understand the best it can what it is about.

The first point explains the emphasis Google gives to site speed, because it is really highly correlated to a better user experience.

The second is related to the quality of the content of a site, and it is substantially what Panda is all about. Panda, if we want to reduce it at its minimal terms, is the attempt by Google of cleaning its SERPs of any content it does not consider useful for the end users.

The third explains the Schema.org adoption and why Google (and the other Search Engines) are definitely moving to the Semantic Web: because it helps search engines organize the bazillion contents they index every second. And the most they understand really what is your content about, the better they will deliver it in the SERPs.

The decline of Link graph

We all know that just with on-site optimization we cannot win the SERPs war, and that we need links to our site to make it authoritative. But we all know how much the link graph can be gamed.

Even though we still have tons of reasons to complain with Google about the quality of SERPs, especially due to sites that ranks thanks to manipulative link building tactics, it is hard for me to believe that Google is doing nothing in order to counteract this situation. What I believe is that Google has decided to solve the problem not with patches but with a totally new kind of graph.

That does not mean that links are not needed anymore, not at all, as links related factors still represent (and will represent) a great portion of all the ranking factors, but other factors are now cooked in the ranking pot.

Be Social and become a trusted seed

In a Social-Caffeinated era, the faster way to understand if a content is popular is to check its "relative" popularity in the social media environment. I say “relative”, because not all contents are the same and if a meme needs many tweets, +1 and likes/share to be considered more popular than others, it is not so for more niche kind of contents. Combining social signals with the traditional link graph, Google can understand the real popularity of a page.

The problem, as many are saying since almost one year, is that it is quite easy to spam in Social Media.

For this reason Google introduced the concepts of Author and Publisher and, even more important, Google linked them to the Google Profiles and is pushing Google Plus, which is not just another Social Media, but what Google aims to be in the future: a social search engine.

Rel=”author” and Rel=”publisher” are the solution Google is adopting in order to better control, within other things, the spam pollution of the SERPs.

If you are a blogger, you will be incentivized in marking your content with Author and link it to your G+ Profile, and as a Site, you are incentivized to create your G+ Business page and to promote it with a badge on you site that has the rel=”publisher” in its code.

Trusted seeds are not anymore only sites, but can be also persons (i.e.: Rand or Danny Sullivan) or social facets of an entity… so, the closer I am in the Social Graph to those persons//entity the more trusted I am to Google eyes.

As we can see, Google is not trying to rely only on the link graph, as it is quite easy to game, but it is not simply adding the social signals to the link graph, because they too can be gamed. What Google is doing is creating and refining a new graph that see cooperating Link graph, Social graph and Trust graph and which is possibly harder to game. Because it can be gamed still, but – hopefully – needing so many efforts that it may become not-viable as a practice.

Wake up SEOs, the new Google is here

As a conclusion, let me borrow what Larry Page wrote on Google+ (bold is mine):

Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience […] because we understand what you want and can deliver it instantly.

This means baking identity and sharing into all of our products so that we build a real relationship with our users. Sharing on the web will be like sharing in real life across all your stuff. You’ll have better, more relevant search results and ads.

Think about it this way … last quarter, we’ve shipped the +, and now we’re going to ship the Google part.

I think that it says it all and what we have lived a year now is explained clearly by the Larry Page words.

What can we do as SEOs? Evolve, because SEO is not dieing, but SEOs can if they don’t assume that winter - oops - the change of Google is coming.