Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts relates the Law of Accelerating Returns to the future of search. Humans think linearly and cannot, therefore, discern their placement on the earth at all times. As a result, the human perception of the future of technology is not entirely accurate. In other words, technology in the future will advance to a much greater level than what humans can currently comprehend.

In applying the law, Spencer says we will see more of the Linguistic User Interface (LUI) and predicts a big shift in transitioning from the Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the LUI. He describes the future interaction with a computer to consist of conversing with an animated personality as opposed to working with a keyboard.

According to Spencer, SEO will evolve with this technology. He believes it will become more metric-oriented but the metrics must also be directly connected to specific actions. As for SEO consultants, he anticipates that they will be similar to existing Web analytics experts.

Do you agree with Stephan Spencer’s predictions for the future of search? To learn more about his predictions, check out his full explanation here.

Now, nearly four months after the announcement, there seems to be a problem. During a session at SMX Advanced, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts revealed that he had found some examples of the Canonical Tag not being obeyed by Google. He raises the issue that the Canonical Tag is merely a “hint” to Google and cannot be fully relied on.

As a result, Stephan recommends using 301 redirects since they are direct and will be obeyed. Stephan believes that Google misunderstood the explanation of his position since a debate broke out about nofollow and PR sculpting during the session and involved Matt Cutts and Nathan Buggia. Lisa Barone, who liveblogged the debate, recalls that Matt indicated that nofollow was not as effective as it once was. Nathan also stated Bing’s position that PR sculpting using nofollow was not a very valuable tactic for users to implement.

At this point, there has been no clarification of the issue. What are your thoughts? Do you agree with Stephan? How do you think this will get resolved?

First of all, Stephan debunks the theory that simply having a blog makes it search engine friendly. While there is a bit of truth to the theory, there are many other benefits that people are missing. For instance, PageRank isn’t always accurate and tag pages and tag clouds aren’t used to their full potential.

Stephan highly recommends WordPress as a blogging platform. The great thing about many of these blogging platforms including WordPress, is that a blog doesn’t have to look like a typical blog. WordPress can be used as a content management system (CMS) and is very search friendly. Stephan’s company site, Netconcepts.com, is a perfect example of this. If he hadn’t told us, no would ever know that the site was running as a WordPress blog.

Another blogging platform Stephan recommends is b2evolution. It brings SEO improvements that aren’t available in other blogging platforms. This platform is also free and runs on your own domain or website.

Lastly, Stephan does not recommend Blogger. His main arguments against it are its limitations. According to Stephan, Blogger users cannot set up 301 redirects and cannot incorporate tag clouds.

Now that you have a couple of recommendations to work with, go out there and utilize these blogging platforms!

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