The top trending topics at the moment are of course about the Haiti tragedy that has been unfolding in the past few days. This disaster hasn’t stopped hardcore spammers from seeing opportunities to make money off all the attention the disaster is getting. What we are seeing is the dark side of Social Media and Real-Time search results.

Spam at the speed of thought

It’s very hard to prevent and police the spam with the technologies that now operate the searchengines and social sites. If we want instant updates, we also live with the danger that some will take advantage of it. If you search for certain haiti related terms, there are some malware sites ranking incredibly high. Some links on sites like twitter go to sites that will try to trick you out of money. How low can you go? Even well meaning people can have a negative effect. A Facebook post in my stream ‘said 3 million dead’, which is a gross overstatement and can induce stress by it self. Our collective emotional response to such traumas will amplify uncertainty, but on the long term, as we become used to it, something even worse might happen: we might actually become dull to events like these.

The better question is what we can do to somewhat improve the matter

There is one thing I can think of that addresses the issue of shortened links that are often used to conceal destinations with inappropriate intentions. Link shortening services should start crawling the destinations of these links and checking for the most common forms of spam and risk factors in real time. Link previews aren’t good enough.

The other way to counter spammers making use of trends is to actively employ people to monitor the real time results so we can much quicker get rid of bad links and bad websites. That shouldn’t be impossible to do since the amount of trending topics are within a manageable range.

So it’s January 2010 and that means that Google Caffeine – an under-the-hood replacement of the google search engine – is due to be released. Or is it already live? I’ve been keeping a close eye on it and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is already live given some fluctuations I have seen occurring.

Although Caffeine shouldn’t affect search rankings a great deal in most cases there are definitely some things all website owners should want to pay attention to:

1) More than ever, Google will favor sites that are speedy.
Slow sites are prone to drop out of favour. Google is obsessed with speed and rightfully so, because the faster their searchengine works, the more money they make. They also want to serve websites that are fast themselves, because low performing websites impair their performance as well.

2) Keep your content fresh.
A site’s age has been an interesting dimension to search engine optimizers. We know that Google values content that is time tested and older content is seen as more trustworthy. Google has had a habit of favoring older domains and content over newer domains and content. I think that will still be the case but the dynamics have changed. And that is great because new domains have been at an unfair disadvantage in getting search rankings and secondly because certain phrases that served up outdated content are a detriment to searchers. For instance when looking for reviews of services, old reviews often pop-up with inaccurate information (try googling “Aweber vs Getresponse”, both companies have been through many changes rendering old but prominent reviews outdated).

It’s still a huge benefit to have an old domain that has been consistent over the years, but now it’s becoming increasingly important to keep the content fresh as well. I think smarter website owners that have content that has been around for years will consider adding blogs or other dynamic features to their website. On the other hand, new sites have more of an opportunity to jump past older pages that aren’t fresh.

3) It’s still about the links…but
We know that a large part of getting good search results is by getting links pointing to our webpages. The type of links going to your site are being judged more than ever. I think we’re seeing that low quality links are becoming less valuable, conversely, high quality links are more than ever will make or break your search rankings. I’ll write about what makes determines the quality of a link in another blog post.
The good news it is harder than ever to win good search positions by applying spammy tactics. The SEO companies relying on lower quality link building will need to up their game. The aimed effect is that the cream will rise to the top.

To recap, the focus for 2010 for website owners of all varieties should be on quality, site performance and freshness of content.