Late December and Early January Search Industry blogs were a wash with their predictions for 2012. Visiting all the usual blogs, and it soon became apparent that most of the industry experts had either been paying the same fortune tellers, in which case they might want see if they can get a refund, or that everyone had unanimously decided to rehash what they say every year but just mention Google+ a bit more.
Predicting what’s going to be major in search for 2012, is a bit like predicting that the weather in Sante Fe will be sunny tomorrow, it’s pretty much a given and nothing groundbreaking is actually being predicted. All the same kinds of things are re-emphasised: quality, relevant and unique content (offsite and onsite), social media is becoming a larger signal influencer, freshness of content matters etc etc.
I’m reading an interesting book at the moment – Everthing is Obvious (Once you know the answer) which deals with this subject and as humans in all areas of life love making predictions which are often flawed from the very beginning. The only predictions we can make with a probability of a certain amount of accuracy are the ones that aren’t really saying a lot. Also when making predictions, we often neglect relevancy and what will be relevant in the future when our predictions may come into force. No one could have predicted that Google would rise to become a multi-billion dollar industry when an offer for a few million was made to its founders: Sergey Brin and Larry Page, or that Facebook would dominated our lives and become the largest and most successful social network out there.
So whilst predicting the major trends for 2012, and what’s going to be important for webmasters, perhaps we should be admitting that our predictions are based on a probability of a certain outcome. Hence, becoming a good guessing game, but nothing we can be sure of. What do you think?
