The Google Search Relations team is meeting to discuss the future of SEO predictions in the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast.
The team of John Mueller, Gary Illyes, and Martin Splitt from Google talks about the changes they have seen in the last decade and anticipates what is to come for SEO.
Specifically, the three Google veterans address the following aspects of SEO predictions and predict how important they will be in the next few years:
- HTML
- JavaScript
- URLs
- Meta tags
- Structured data
- Content
- Voice search
And more
Here are all the important moments of the episode of over 45 minutes.
The future of HTML in SEO
Mueller suggests that SEO predictions will not have to learn HTML in the future, as content management systems (CMS) become more adept at taking care of the technical aspects of a website.
“Well, I mean it’s like you just have a rich editor and you enter things, then you format the text correctly and you add a few links. What do you have to do with HTML? ”
Illyes disagrees, saying that SEO means more than content writing. There are important elements of SEO that require some understanding of HTML and are unlikely to change in the future.
By the end of the discussion, everyone agrees that HTML is not going anywhere in terms of SEO.
The future of JavaScript in SEO
JavaScript may become more important for SEO predictions in the future, but more so from the progressive web application (PWA) than traditional websites.
The future of URLs in SEO
Mueller also discusses the subject of URLs and whether they could disappear in favor of entities or IP addresses.
Illyes says he doesn’t see the URLs disappearing soon:
The future of SEO meta tags
Mueller asks if there is a possibility that more meta tags will be introduced in the future.
Splitt immediately dropped the idea, saying there was almost never a good reason to introduce a new meta tag:
The future of structured data in SEO
Will there ever be a time in the future when Google doesn’t need structure data to understand what’s on a page?
Splitt says Google is close at the moment, but structured data is still useful and recommended:
The future of content in SEO
Mueller discusses the subject of text generation algorithms and whether SEO will even need human writers in the future.
Illyes has so much to say on this subject that he thinks he should have his own podcast episode.
In short, Illyes sees the potential of machine-generated content and says it can be indistinguishable from sometimes human-written content.
However, Google does not want to classify search engine-generated content unless it has been reviewed by people.
The future of voice search in SEO
Voice search is unlikely to be the next important thing in SEO, so don’t worry too much about learning how to optimize it.
When asked about voice search, Splitt says:
“Oh, my God, the future that will never be. I don’t think so, because if we learn something – I remember a few years ago, people would say, “Oh, we’ll stop using keyboards and just make a voice.”
And I think that’s been a recurring theme in the ’90s. But I don’t think it’s going to change in the future and it’s going to naturally or magically become the main thing we have to worry about, simply because it’s changing the way we introduce it. and it probably changes the way queries are formulated, but it doesn’t. t change the fundamental use of natural language to retrieve information from the Internet.
So I don’t think you have to worry too much about that, to be honest, but maybe it’s just me.
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