Whilst it’s no secret that there will be a change in 2010, these changes will hardly be noticeable by users but the wave of over reaction prompted by some SEOs will certainly cause confusion amongst companies looking to source a reputable SEO Company.

The simple fact is that no one except Google knows what the update will do and you cannot prepare for it.

The only preparation you can do is to protect yourself against SEOs offering to optimise your site for the new update – these will be the same companies who blame the caffeine update when your rankings disappear after they make these contrived changes to your site.

Google’s Matt Cutts quite clearly tells us that the users won’t be able to tell the difference and even those who tested out the public test site hardly noticed any difference in results. See for yourself in Matt Cutt’s video below.

Beware the SEO soothsayers and self proclaimed experts!

If the Florida Update is anything to go by then it’s safe to assume that Google have well and truly learned their lesson from it. However, and despite assurances from them since, some respected(?) SEOs still insist upon wreaking havoc by making wild predictions about what will happen every time Google announces an update. Take the wild predictions made by Bruce Clay in his infamous Ranking is dead in 2009 video last year.  Amongst these was the prediction that if the top 10 sites don’t have video on their pages then they could lose their rankings overnight. His predictions were wrong of course and he later went on to blame them on a “large beer” in this video, however the fact remains that countless SEOs sold his concepts to unsuspecting clients and videos started appearing on every site you could find.

Did those sites without video lose their rankings overnight? Of course not.

We read about this nonsense every day and the “experts” all predict that rankings will disappear everytime Google announces an update. Most of these predictions are based on articles that other “experts” have written which are then re spun in such a way that it causes panic/buzz and everyone has to do something about it – often with adverse results.

If it doesn’t come from Google then don’t believe everything these self proclaimed experts tell you.

There are no new ways to get on top of the search engines, there’s no secret sauce and there’s no inside information. All the soothsayers convinced us that rankings would turn upside down in 2009 but they didn’t.

Ranking in 2009 is very much alive and all those that continued ranking pages using tried and trusted methods (like ourselves) are the ones that outperformed everyone else.

The prime factor for ranking on Google before the Caffeine update was links, it still is links and probably will always be links for years to come.