Google talks about the future of SEO

In the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast, Google’s search relations team got together to discuss the future of SEO.

Google’s John Mueller, Gary Illyes, and Martin Splitt team talked about the changes they have seen in the past ten years and predicted the next step in SEO.

More specifically, three Google veterans talked about the following aspects of SEO and predicted their importance in the next few years:

• HTML
• JavaScript
• URL
• Meta tags
• Structured data
• content
• Voice search
• And more

Here are all the highlights of the episode over 45 minutes.

The future of HTML in SEO

Mueller suggested that SEO will not need to learn HTML in the future because content management systems (CMS) are becoming more and more adept at handling the technical aspects of websites.

“Well, I mean, it’s like you only have a rich editor, you just need to enter the content, then format the text correctly and add some links. What do you need to do with HTML?”

Illyes disagrees, saying that SEO is more than just writing content. Some important elements of SEO require a certain understanding of HTML, and they are unlikely to change in the future.

“But SEO is also about link tags, meta tags, and title elements, and all those weird things you can put in the head of the HTML.

Therefore, you kind of want to learn about them to control the appearance of your code snippets or how your title is displayed in search results, and the rel canonical tag to control the canonical version or canonical version of the URL. You kind of want to know this. “

At the end of the discussion, they agreed that as far as SEO is concerned, HTML has nowhere to go.

The future of JavaScript in SEO

JavaScript may become more important for SEO in the future, but it is more important than traditional websites in terms of progressive web applications (PWA).

Mueller said:

“I think users kind of want to be able to use any application they own on any platform they use, on any device. I feel that this kind of work will continue. And maybe, this means that understanding things like JavaScript will also be good for SEO. become more and more important……

But this may also mean that many of these applications suddenly have to consider general SEO. Just like what they really want to find on the Internet, because in the past, they were just apps. “

The future of URLs in SEO

Mueller raised the topic of URLs and whether they will be replaced by entities or IP addresses.

Illyes said he won’t see the URL disappear anytime soon:

“Fortunately, URLs will not disappear…at least they will not disappear for the foreseeable future, because they are
The standard way of transmitting addresses on the Internet. Without it, the Internet is not the Internet.

Similarly, domain names will not disappear because of how the Internet is built, or IP addresses will not disappear because of how the Internet is built. Just like the URL will not disappear. “

The future of meta tags in SEO

Mueller asked if it is possible to introduce more meta tags in the future.

Splitt immediately rejected this idea, saying that there is almost never a good reason to introduce a new meta tag:

“I hope we will not introduce more meta tags. Usually, when you see internal threads, for example, this search team wants to introduce a new meta tag. Then usually John and I will jump to that topic, we are very Fight back aggressively, because there are few good reasons to introduce new meta tags.”

The future of structured data in SEO

Will there be cases in the future where Google does not need structural data to understand the content of a page?

Splitt said that Google has almost reached that time, but structured data is still useful and worth recommending:

“I’m pretty sure we can understand: Oh, this is a product, the name of the product is this, the price of the product is that, this is a product image.

But having this kind of clear machine-readable information is a great way to say: “Oh, so they especially want us to treat it as a product.” It’s basically a beautifying meta tag…”

The future of SEO content

Mueller raised the topic of text generation algorithms and whether human writers are needed for future SEO.

Illyes has a lot to say on this issue, and he thinks it should have its own podcast.

In short, Illyes saw the potential of machine-generated content and stated that it is sometimes indistinguishable from human-written content.

However, Google does not want to rank machine-generated content in search unless it is manually reviewed.

“I think this may be a topic in future podcast episodes because we can see the pros and cons of machine-generated content, and we are very strict about what is allowed in the index.

But on the other hand, you can also see very good and intelligent machine-generated content-I don’t know if intelligence is a good word, but very intelligent machine-generated content…

Currently, our position on machine-generated content is that if there is no human supervision, we don’t want it to appear in searches. If someone reviews it before releasing it to the public, that’s great. “

The future of SEO voice search

Voice search is unlikely to be the next big thing in SEO, so don’t worry too much about learning how to optimize it.

When asked about voice search, Splitt said:

“Oh my God, there will never be a future. I don’t think so, because if we learn anything-I remember many years ago, people would say: Oh, we will stop using the keyboard and just do voice.

I think this is a recurring theme in the 90s. But I think in the future, it will not change, and will naturally or magically become the first thing we need to worry about, just because it changes the input mode, it may change the way the query is worded, but it will not t Change the basic use of natural language to retrieve information from the Internet.

So I don’t think you need to worry too much, to be honest, but it may just be me. “

Listen to the full podcast program below:

source: Search records

Featured image: Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock