SEO trends can hold important changes for your business and marketing strategies online. If you value being on the cutting edge and keeping a step ahead of the competition, you’ll want to keep an eye out for these trends. They come in two categories: those minimizing the effect of harmful websites and those rewarding legitimate and authoritative websites.

Attacking harmful websites:

These changes protect your legitimate websites by targeting spammers and hackers. As long as you’re not a spammer yourself (which I trust is the case), they may not change your operating routines, but they will help you gain an advantage over spammers. Specific details include:

• Spammy Queries: Some searches are more likely to turn spammy than others- for example, a payday loans search. Traditionally the team that tackles spam would tend to focus on other areas, but now they’re planning to go for these queries as well. In the near future, users may be able to search for payday loans safely.
• Advertorials: Some advertorials are getting out of hand and affecting PageRank. This behavior violates Google’s quality guidelines. In addition, paid ads (while not wrong in themselves) need to be disclosed as such so that customers realize they are paid ads. In the near future, stronger measures will be taken to enforce these two points.
• Penguin: Penguin 2.0 will target webspam with efficiency never before seen. It specializes in seeking out and destroying blackhat, which will make the internet safer for customers and improve the odds for legitimate businesses.
• Sophisticated Link Analysis: This software isn’t ready to be released yet, but in future it will dramatically improve understanding of links, giving another advantage in the battle against spam.
• Hacked Sites: Google is working on detecting, cleaning up and warning people about hacked sites with greater efficiency than ever before.

Boosting Legitimate Websites:

These changes directly improve the playing field for your website by focusing on efficiency and working out the kinks inherent in search engines.

• Authority Boost: One of the coolest updates for webmasters will be a detection that identifies if you’re an expert in your field, and then gives you a boost in the rankings. In practice, this could put you closer to page one in search results, effectively boosting traffic to your site. Customers will benefit by more easily finding the best websites on the subject they’re searching for.
• Webmaster Communication: Google is actively planning instances of better communication, particularly within Google Webmaster Tools.
• Domain Clusters: Isn’t it annoying to do a search and find a bunch of links on the first page all leading you to the same website? This year, Google is working on eliminating these "clusters" and bringing more diversity on every page of the search, especially on the first.
• Panda Sympathy: In the past, some sites have been affected by Panda that actually have promise as legitimate websites. New changes to Panda will give these struggling websites the benefit of the doubt so they have a chance to succeed.

As you can see, keeping up with SEO changes can be helpful for your website, and it’s exciting to see how things will be changing for the better.