Google has the maximum search market share accounting for over 69% (according to 2008 stats) from other competitors. This is because Google has never compromised with quality while presenting search results to their visitors. An effort has always been there from Google’s side to find out the best possible search for any given topic. Nowadays, Google can even crawl and index flash presentations.

Black hat seo techniques to become even more malicious: As a smart SEO one has to decide to his risk tolerance while promoting a website. To sustain in the long run in search results, the best way is to be honest and focused in extending services to the visitors. These days SEs have become smarter in dealing with those who do ‘illegal things’  . Google is not going to tolerate the black hat seo techniques like 300 ease in one slide, dns sub domain hijacking, cross site scripting attacks, installation of Malware  in others machine etc.

Emphasis on personalized search: Although Google does produce search results on the basis of IP address of the visitor, but sometimes results appear from other countries too. It’s indeed more impressive if a visitor sees a list of websites that cover service in his / her country or even area. For example, say a visitor of Virginia in USA is searching for home loan in Google. If s/he finds a list of websites (best available websites) that provide home loan in Virginia, nothing can be better than that from SE’s point of view. So presentation of result keeping in mind about personalization as well as localization has become the need of the hour. On the other hand, the websites that facilitates various languages to see its websites are going to get some extra value for Google in the coming days.

Focusing more in User’s satisfaction level rather than ranking: Few SEOs jump on their toes by seeing their website at no.1 in ranking, but the concept has changed today. What is the use of it if your website is getting less number of conversions and moreover, visitors are just leaving your website after few seconds? Smart SEOs are highly concerned about conversions, server logs, content updates etc. If we can focus on how we can satisfy a visitor more by increasing his time of stay in our website, then only the ranking becomes worthy.  So the challenge is not to pay attention to your ranking, it’s to pay attention to the conversion, content and visitors satisfaction level. Google also appreciates if we can extend services by creating helpful videos, e-books etc.

Frequent changes in Meta tags, keyword density etc.: Sometimes we become impatient if we don’t see our website ranking among the top 10 result. We start changing on-page things like page title, meta keywords and descriptions, keyword density etc. Google make a note of such unnecessary optimization stuffs and sometimes throw out the site from its consideration. In stead of doing that, if one can work on adding more services onto the page that will always give a better impression. Say for an insurance website, if the webmaster adds an insurance calculator or similar services that will not only add value but also help in ranking.

rel is a  link attribute and setting its value to no follow tells search engines that certain links on your webpage should not be followed or more importantly should not pass your web page’s hard earned reputation.

<a href=”www.test.com” rel=”nofollow”>test</a>

This can generally be very useful when you have a blog or other areas where you have user generated content like forums, guest books etc.

Suppose you have a blog with public commenting turned on, now links within those comment may pass some your pages reputation to other pages that you may not be willing to endorse. Specially blog commenting is very susceptible to such kind of spammy links. And linking to sites that google considers spammy can affect your website big time. However you can keep a check on such kind of links by CAPTCHA and turning on comment moderation.

Another advantage adding no follow links is suppose you are writing a content and want to add some kind of reference to a particular website but at the same time do not want to pass on your pages reputation you can use this property. For Example: Suppose you are writing a blog post of spammers and want to refer to his website and warn fellow bloggers by putting his links on your post, but you certainly don’t want to share your page’s value. So just by adding rel=”nofolow” to the links will solve your problem.

Also if you want that none of the links on your webpage should be followed you can add that in your robots meta tag in the head section of your website.

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”>

This will nofollow all the link on that webpage

Note: some of the points written above are taken from Google’s Search Engine Optimization Guide