Annie Qureshi — December 16, 2016

— December 16, 2016

What the latest updates to Google’s algorithm mean for you

People new to the SEO sphere may not know this, but in the beginning, things were very simple. Google’s PageRank was a big deal back then and every website tried to game the system to appear in the top results of the search engine. People quickly figured out how Google weighted the search results and began manipulating them in every way possible to make their own website’s rank higher. The reason that the system was so easy to manipulate back then was that it didn’t take into account the fact that people would game it.

How SEO Used to be

Google had a few ways to check whether a website was good or not. The two biggest factors were keywords and how many other websites linked to a website. If a website had the right keyword and had many other websites linking to it Google considered it a good website and ranked it highly. This led to websites that used keyword stuffing (where you just insert the relevant keyword as much as possible) to make their website seem more relevant. This is where ‘backlinks’ come from. Websites would work with other websites and add lots of links to each other to improve the ranking of everyone. This led to horrible search results and spam filled websites being ranked highly. Then Google launched Google Panda and Google Penguin, updates to their search algorithm which changed SEO completely.

Google Panda

Suddenly websites that used to be in the top results started being banned. People had started to notice that Google’s results were worsening and Google shook things up to remove the spam websites from the results. Panda was Google’s first attempt at judging not just the popularity of the website but its quality as well. Google has also been very secretive about how the algorithm works. Panda targets websites that have useless or irrelevant content. When Google was asked details about Panda they provided a checklist to see whether your website qualified as ‘low quality’.

The biggest item from the list was content quality. Google claims that the Panda algorithm change purely works at promoting high quality websites and doing away with websites that had ‘thin content’ which readers didn’t appreciate. SEO experts quickly figured out some ways that Google used to determine a website’s quality. One measure is how much time a reader spends on the website. If they open the page and quickly close it to return to search results, Google will know that the website doesn’t have content which people like. There are many other similar measures – even the social media popularity of a website matters.

Google Penguin

Google Penguin, on the other hand, focuses on the structure of the website. It began as a measure of ensuring that websites using backlinks to improve their ranking would be punished. If your website had a lot of links that seemed inorganic it would simply stop appearing in search results. The only way to ensure that your website doesn’t get hit by a penalty is ensuring that your website only uses legitimate links where needed. According to an infographic on Google Penguin, there are a number of warning signs that a brand has been penalized, including:

• Not ranking for its own name
• Dropping at least a full page in the SERPs
• Not seeing any indexed pages when using the site: operator for the website on Google

Brands need to be aware of the risks of upcoming Penguin updates. They must use different SEO strategies to avoid them.

The State of SEO Today

Google is going to make more changes to Penguin and the new algorithm will be more reactive. It is being touted as ‘Penguin Live’ because it will keep changing the ranking and score of websites with every update. The only way to ensure that your website still appears at the top of the search results is to generate content which genuinely elicits engagement. This is why so many SEO experts tend to focus on the social media side of things. The experts know what is needed to make your website genuinely SEO worthy. SEO these days isn’t about gaming the system but about making your website as good as it can be to appear in the top ranked search results.

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