The first few posts I saw were big on hype, but with very little substance. However this article from Mashable explains things a lot more.
Of course we don't know what the effect of this change in Google's approach will have on Bloggers - especially those who rely on search results to get people to visit their blogs. But here are a couple of predictions:
1) SEO, as we know it, will be less and less important.
Writing for human (ish!) beings will be ever-more important.
No prizes for this one: SEO's changing all the time. But I think that the change will be dramatic. Once Google's algorithms know that a blog is a type of website, and that it's something that ordinary people want to put gadgets onto, and that gadgets are just small bits of code that do something useful, then searches like "how do I to put a list of favourtie posts into my blog" are more likely to return posts that tell you how to use the link-list gadget.
2) Good grammar will matter more
The beauty of keyword searches is that they just spot relevant words, or clusters of words.
Today,it doesn't matter if you say
" This few wrong SEO tricks will down the visibility of your blog in search engine result page."
(thanks for the phrase, Tips and Tricks for Bloggers)Because, all other things being equal, that sentence will be found by someone who who searches for the keywords that are used.
But with a semantic-network in the picture, the way that the sentences in our blogs are put together is likely to matter. Searching, for example, for
"what eats, roots and leaves" vsis likely to return a vastly different set of results. (Or it would if that wasn't such a hackneyed example that probably half of the English grammar websites in the world use it already.)
"what eats roots and leaves"
Blogger is a long way behind in providing tools to help us write better English (or French or Dutch or Portugese or Spanish or Greek or whatever) - they've only given us a spell-checker in the last year or two, whereas even Microsoft Word has offered basic grammar checking, in English at least, for ages. Perhaps converting from MS word to Blogger via Word will become more important than before.
Why this post:
Normally, I only post about changes that have already happened, which I think may affect Blogger-users right now. This is an exception, because I believe we need to be thinking about how the knowledge in our blogs is structured and presented to that it makes semantic sense. And we need to do this thinking now, not sometime down the track when Google is presenting semantic search results. (And besides, I really liked the Mashable post).
