2011 was the year of the Panda; Google penalizing sites with thin content and ultimately encouraging all website owners to publish high-quality content. 2012 was the year of the Penguin; Google penalized sites who were violating their Quality Guidelines with link schemes and other fishy link building activities. Will Google unleash a major update named after another one of my favorite animals in 2013? Stay tuned! What I have done is read through a number of predictions from SEO experts to compile a list of 10 of the most popular SEO predictions (and few of my own) for 2013.
A potential sneak peak of what to expect in 2013:
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Content, content content. Quality content is already king and its importance will only continue to grow in 2013.
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Thanks primarily to the organic exposure Google Authorship can provide to a content site, more and more online content writers will begin to use Google+.
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Google will develop ways to delay their organic search ranking updates, making it more difficult for search engine spammers to correlate which of their black hat activities are having the greatest impact on their rankings.
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As inbound linking becomes more difficult and we all need to be more careful about our SEO activities, we'll start to see a lot more SEO auditing services to make sure we won't get bitten by the Penguin.
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Google will address the increase in "not provided" keywords reported by Analytics and provide a way to obtain this valuable data once again. This is more of a wish of mine, but seems like a reasonable request especially for AdWords users. If this prediction doesn't come true, I can foresee web analytics solutions becoming more and more inaccurate.
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Guest posting will become more and more popular. Likewise, search engines will become more vigilant in cracking down on spammy guest posting sites.
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Link baiting and earning links with useful content will become the norm, as we start to see link building begin to fade away.
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More and more link farms will begin to finally disappear.
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With the increase of mobile device users, search engines will favor mobile-friendly sites in their algorithms.
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Search engines will put less emphasis on anchor text and will instead focus more on the quality of the link source.
