At the beginning of each year, SEO’s predict the new changes we’ll see to the search landscape. Most of the time these predictions are way off the mark or too vague to validate. Sometimes, however, their foresight is spot-on. Let’s look at four predictions for SEO in 2014 that have come to fruition less than two month into the new year.

“Google Will Publicly Acknowledge Algorithmic Updates Targeting Guest Posting”

Rand Fishkin

Well, that didn’t take too long. Just 15 days after Rand published his 2014 SEO predictions, Matt Cutts came forward with the infamous blog post titled “The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO.” SEO’s everywhere went into panic mode.

While Cutts did not specify that any algorithm updates have taken place (and many question the feasibility of algorithmically devaluing links based on the perceived legitimacy of a guest post), we will all think twice before taking on a guest blogging opportunity.

“We Will See Significant Additions in Natural Language Search Capability”

Eric Enge

We’ve seen evidence of Google improving its natural language (type “restaurants around here” for a quick example), especially since the release of Hummingbird. While this will continue to improve, they are also focusing on predictive search.

Google Now is Google’s mobile voice assistant and the counterpart to Apple’s Siri. Now uses natural language processing to execute commands, answer questions and even provide predictive information.

Earlier this month, Google released the ability to receive Now notifications to Chrome beta on your desktop device. You’ll be updated on the score of the game, the status of your shipment, and the traffic on the way home from work minutes before you leave. Your desktop browser will be able to decide which information to provide based on activity from your mobile device.

Google has also released a new version of the Google Now launcher for the Nexus 5, which is rumored to be available to all Android devices soon. Google is getting better at understand language and behavior to improve search results.

“Resumes Listing ‘Content Marketing’ Will Grow Faster than Either ‘SEO’ or ‘Social Media Marketing'”

Rand Fishkin

Starting off the new year on a hot streak, Rand also predicted that number of LinkedIn users who will add “content marketing” to their resumes will grow at a rate 50% greater than that of “social media marketing” and “SEO.” Rand observed the following data points by doing a keyword search on LinkedIn.

content marketing 81, 529 profiles

social media marketing 2,767,263 profiles

SEO 1,268,195 profiles

I ran the same search roughly 5 weeks after Rand and pulled the following data.

content marketing 87,278 profiles (7.05% increase)

social media marketing 2,882,281 profiles (4.16% increase)

SEO 1,308,530 profiles (3.18% increase)

As of this time of writing, “content marketing” is being added to resumes at rate that is 70% greater than “social media marketing” and 122% greater than “SEO”. If this trend holds, and I believe it will, the term “content marketing” will be part of our industry lexicon for a long time to come.

“New Measures [Will Be] Taken to Keep Semantic Markup from being Abused.”

Ruth Burr

The Moz team should buy some lottery tickets. Ruth Burr, their Inbound Marketing Lead, made the prediction a month before webmasters began noticing a new-looking structured markup penalty in WMT.

Spammy structured markup

Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google’s Rich Snippet Quality guidelines.

Google is committed to protecting the integrity of Schema markup as they undoubtedly continue to roll out new features in 2014.

Do you know of any predictions for SEO in 2014 that have already materialized? Send them my way and they’ll be added to the list.