Google has never been transparent in how they rank, weigh, and chronicle data in their search page rankings. The weight of keywords over backlinks has never been officially ranked within the context of its importance, which has made a lot of SEO a guessing game from 2003- 2010. Only in the past few years have we begun to get a strong grasp on what quality SEO means. But recent Google changes are being declared the biggest since 2001. The new update is called Hummingbird, and it has enhanced the importance of mobile content, revitalized the strategy of quality over quantity, and has generally lessened the impact of backlink proxy systems, documents Entreprenuer.com.

These recent changes will cause a domino effect in the SEO industry moving into 2014. The following trends will certainly follow, either directly or indirectly relating to these massive changes in SEO value from Google.

The Art of Diversification

Forbes.com details the concept behind these changes. Google is looking to enhance the quality of their searches, and high quality SEO marketers should openly embrace the focus on real valuable content.

A way to gain value is through diversifying outside text-only articles. Brand Dignity offers a few core examples of content diversity, including:

• Embedded YouTube videos and original format videos
• Detailed tutorials over a few pages and not just confined to a single page
• Infographics (visual cues, originally designed infographics)
• Diagrams that break up article content

Many blogs in the past drew major traffic through strictly text or embedded videos. But now SEO will rely more on multiple mediums and content types.

Privatized Hosting and Google Plus

These two entities together make for a dominating combination, as private hosting generally ranks higher than being featured on a content management system, documents CMS Report.

The latest Google algorithm has gotten better at identifying quality brands featured and backed through Google Plus than non-brands. This means that a website boosted by paid SEO on a Wordpress platform must have Google Plus backing and brand identity to rank proportionally high, confirms Search Engine Land. Of course, the resource goes on to detail that quality content is more important than ever before, and that can just as easily be achieved on Wordpress, but it should be backed by a private server. This means dropping the Wordpress tagline in the domain (i.e. mywebsite.wordpress.com). Before you make any moves with deciding how to run your site, you'll want to look into a VPS resource, a cloud knowledge base, or some type of hosting information site and compare your options.

Super Content: Buffed Up Writing with Major Substance

Search Engine Journal reports a general trend towards 'super articles.' These are pieces of content upwards of 1,000 to 2,000 words. For reasons of pacing, they will be spread over multiple pages to draw in click throughs. 500-word blog posts that offer little new information are all too easy to obtain, and Google has undervalued them in the latest Hummingbird update.

An article by Neil Palet posted on Quick Sprout documents a significant example of this trend towards epic content. As more and more topics are being covered in full force, competitors will offer more substance to compete or just bloat the content with richer detail and history. Where one article details the top 50 best Christmas gifts, a competitor displays the top 100 in their respective article. The resource further details that content marketing is not adversely affected by these updates, but cookie-cutter paid-for SEO marketing does.