But to get serious – there must be some other predictions regarding search than hacking, malware in 2010, right? Of course there are! Some weeks ago I wrote an article about trends within Search in Swedish. It was before I started this blog so now  I’ve taken the time now to translate it into English so you won’t have to use Google Translate all the time.

Some of the predictions in the original article are completely based on Search in Sweden, and it’s quite differenent internationally. Therefore some predictions have been taken away and some have been modified.

So here comes this weeks list: 10 Search Predictions for 2010 that not have gone through Googles filter:

1. Dude, Where’s My SERP?

The classic, organic search results that we all now will be much harder to find. With real time search, Personalized search, images, blogs, news, local and other kind of results that Google, Bing and the others provide it will come to a point where we ask ourselves the question: Dude, where’s my SERP?

2. Twitter will become a real player within search

2010 will be the year that Twitter will become really good regarding real time search. They’ve already said that they will put relevancy, links and authority into consideration when they present search result and I do believe them. Of course they will compete with Bing/Google because of the fact that they now include tweets. But the natural place to search when it comes to real time events will still be Twitter in 2010.

3. It’s a Bing, Bing World!

2010 will be the year that Bing will rise and for some people it will become a more fresh alternative to Google when it comes to search. I think that Bing will have a market share of 15-20% in the US at the same time that Yahoo will keep their position. For the first time in a long time we will see that Googles market share will decline when it comes to search.

4. Paid Tweets is the new Paid Links

I like to call this “Pay Per Tweet”, PPT, just because it makes PowerPoint nerds scratch their heads in confusion when I write about it.

Nontheless, Pay Per Tweet will become an effective tactic when it comes to search. The rise of real time results will make the use of tweets and status updates more efficient when it comes to ranking.

The big question here will of course be: Shall search engines follow Paid Tweets? Yep you are perfectly right: Paid Tweets is the new Paid Links.

5. Bye bye nofollow!

Google have launched their own URL shortener (goo.gl) so for me it’s quite clear that it is time to not listened to what Google says regarding “nofollow” anymore. Google wants us to believe that they do not follow links with rel=”nofollow”, but I don’t trust them on this issue.

Ask yourself this question: If you get 1 000 ReTweets on a tweet with a fantastic link – don’t you believe that the search engines will take this into consideration?

6. SEO-investments will increase

There will be a lot more investments in SEO in 2010. Maybe not that classical SEO companies will increase their revenue with 100% but rather that more agencies will sell SEO services. Especially in Europe we will see more web agencys, adertising agencies & PR agencies offering SEO services.

7. Your mobile is your best search friend

With services like Visual Search (Google Googles) and other smart implementations there will be a huge challenge for SEO 2010 to optimize for mobile search. You have no idea how many 16-20 year old girls in Sweden that wished for a iPhone as christmas gift and got it from their nice father, just to make her lovely daughter happy. SEMPO has already written about this and it will become even more important in 2010.

The big question is: How to we target a iPhone/Android-user that use the mobile for search?

8. Real Time Spam

I’ve written about this earlier that spam will yet again be a huge problem for search engines. This time it will come in the form of Twitter spam, Facebook spam, blog spam and other things to target the real time results. There will be a huge debate about this in 2010 just because Google and the other engines have opened up a big can of spam that a lot of Viagra sites will use.

My hope is of course that the search engines will manage to fix this pretty fast and that we in the end of 2010 can look back and see that it was just in the beginning of 2010 spam was a huge problem.

9. Facebook release an upgraded search engine

Facebook is huge in Europe and in the Scandinavian countries over 40% of the population have Facebook. That’s a lot! When a lot of people have Facebook they will start searching on Facebook if they provide with good search results. Approximately 90-95% of all girls between 18-23 in Sweden have Facebook, just to give you a hint. The real question to ask yourself is this: Why do I have to go to Google when I can search on Facebook?

This is something Facebook knows and that’s the reason why they develop their search quite a lot. Facebook will be better at this 2010 and we will start talking about Facebook as a search engine, not only a social network.

10. Personalized Search is here to stay

Many SEO:s love to just not think about personalized search and tell that it doesn’t matter that much. I think that this is a huge mistake and that personalized search will grow a lot in 2010. We have just seen the beginning of it yet and therefore the search results will not be that different, but be so sure that Google will tweak this more during 2010.

There you have my predicitons for this year. Will I be right on my predictions? Maybe, maybe not – only time will tell…

10 Search Predictions for 2010 is a post from: Late Night Marketing

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