I recently read this article in Forbes magazine and it fascinates and amazes me that search engine optimisation (SEO), which has been at the forefront of the mind of anyone who works in online marketing, could possibly be obsolete in 2 years' time! People have made their fortunes honing this specialised skill to get their clients to the top of organic search engine rankings.

Unfortunately the unscrupulous use of black hat techniques - faking organic results by seeding keywords into irrelevant content - has resulted in Google making a push towards more quality content.

Google has re-weighted their emphasis from "backlinks" (people linking to your site which is easily faked) more towards social media likes, shares, tweets, reddits, and 1+ (Googles obvious favourite.)

Although these can still be faked, there is an obvious human element that can't be overlooked. People reading your quality content, liking and sharing it with their network will result in a higher organic Google result for your website. The better (and more viral) your content, the higher you rank which paves the way for us users to see higher quality, interesting, informative content.

Obviously "white hat" SEO techniques, meta tags, keywords, etc. won't be done away with entirely but this push from the Mac Daddy of search engines to promote quality content restores my faith in the interwebs and all that is good in the online world.