Why are we not surprised?  On Google’s blog today: “Helping Computers Understand Language,” there’s an article about how their robots can understand synonyms. Well… Who didn’t know that?

For a long time, SEOs have been saying that Google spiders had the ability for latent semantic indexing or LSI. This is proof positive. Google can understand what your page is about just by the words you’re using, and those aren’t necessarily “hard” keywords or keyword phrases.

Don’t get me wrong, having good keywords is still quite important, but trying to stuff keywords and keyword phrases where they don’t belong is an exercise in stupidity. The spiders can read, for heaven’s sakes, and if you write a post or article about “golf clubs,” for example, and use words like swing, golf balls, green, putting, etc… They’re going to know what your article is about.

And here’s something that was interesting to me:

“… our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where
synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.”

That happened when the spider mistook “precision” for PC, but think about it. If it was right 99% of the time, that’s pretty impressive.

So, people are looking for golf clubs, and maybe they just type in golf equipment. Google knows to include golf clubs, right? They’re just getting smarter and smarter all the time.

When I’m writing, I don’t really worry too much about keywords, which is a big no-no, but here’s how I feel. If Google’s spiders come to my blog, and see even Google and spider in the same post, they’ll know I”m talking about them. Since my blog is about SEO…

the bug can make the connection, people. I’m tellin’ ya.

I’m guessing that keywords won’t be as important as they once were and having an abnormally high incidence of a keyword or keyword phrase won’t help, only hurt. Google hates it when you try to game the system. And readers aren’t stupid. They don’t want to read poorly written material and will just go away.

So, don’t write for spiders. Write for people. Be natural. Write about your niche. Use the words surrounding your niche, and the spiders will find you and rank you accordingly.

Technorati Tags: google, search spiders, lsi, latent semantic indexing, seo

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