Looks like Google's messing with SEO pirates again...

For Search Engine Optimization efforts, Google's dominance over the search engine world make Google the primary focus for most SEO campaigns, as well as for the majority of "black hat" (generally illegal or banned techniques) artists who try to game the system to achieve top ranks on the popular search engine.

Rankings on Google are determined by a closely guarded algorythm that supposedly indexes all sites on the Internet and accounts for some measure of relvance to search terms provided by users.  In an ideal world, a user would enter a complete thought or question, and the search engine would determine what the user was asking, and provide an appropriate answer based on that determination.  Of course, anyone using the Internet knows that this simple concept, known as "Semantic Search", is still a dream of the distant future.

So when Google announced that it has improved its vaunted search engine algorythms to utiliza semantic search capabilities, many of us in the SEO business rushed to check our rankings in response to the news.

And what do you know, very little has changed (my rankings across 10 websites showed no noticable or dramatic dip or gain from the changes), which makes me think that maybe Google isn't really doing as much development as promotion (which is hard to determine considering the secrecy of their majical algorythms), and is still leaving the door wide open for competitors to step up with a better way to find information.