What are Google Algorithm updates? Why should your seo agency know about these?
Google Algorithm
Google Algorithm is simply code that Google uses to rank websites in their search engine results pages (SERPs). The algorithm takes into account a variety of different factors, including site structure, content marketing quality, and user engagement. Google regularly updates the algorithm to ensure that their users are getting the most relevant and accurate results for their queries.
While the Google Algorithm is constantly evolving, there are some key ranking factors that have remained consistent over time. These include:
– Site structure: Google favours sites with a well-organised hierarchy and clear navigation.
– Content marketing quality: Google wants to provide their users with the best possible results, so they favour websites with high-quality, informative content marketing. This means that your site’s content marketing should be well-written and relevant to your target audience.
– User engagement: Google tracks how users interact with your site, including things like click-through rate and time on site. They use this data to determine whether your site is providing a good user experience, and sites that provide a poor experience are less likely to rank well.
What are Google Algorithm Updates?
Google frequently updates its search algorithms to improve the quality of search results. These updates can sometimes be significant, and they can have a major impact on the visibility of websites in Google’s search results. For example some businesses move up, and some down during a roll out of an algorithm update.
Some of the most notable algorithm updates include:
Google Panda:
– Google Panda: First launched in 2011, Google Panda was designed to penalize sites with low-quality or thin content. Google Penguin: First launched in 2012, Google Penguin was designed to target sites that were engaging in spammy link building practices. Google Pigeon: First launched in 2014, Google Pigeon was designed to improve local search results. Google Mobilegeddon: First launched in 2015, Google Mobilegeddon was designed to give preference to mobile-friendly websites in Google’s mobile search results.
While algorithm updates can be disruptive, they are also an important part of Google’s efforts to improve the quality of its search results.
Websites that focus on creating high-quality, relevant content marketing are more likely to fare well in the long run, even in the face of algorithm changes.
Google BERT
Google BERT is a Google AI language model that was introduced in October 2019. It is based on the transformer architecture and pre-trained on Google’s own corpus of 2 billion words.
Google BERT is designed to improve the state of the art in natural language understanding tasks such as named entity recognition and question answering.
Google BERT has been shown to outperform previous models on a range of natural language understanding tasks. Google BERT is open source and available for anyone to use.
Google RankBrain
Google RankBrain is Google’s machine learning artificial intelligence system that processes and understands queries, especially long-tail and complex queries. Google stated in a blog post that 15% of all daily searches are new to Google.
RankBrain uses query understanding to match a searcher’s query with the best possible result.
Google revealed in October 2015 that RankBrain had been used for “several months” to help process search results, particularly long tail and complex queries. Google has not elaborated on how RankBrain works beyond saying it is ” Google’s machine-learning artificial intelligence system.”
Some search engine optimisers (SEOs) in Bristol believe that Google may be using RankBrain to better understand the searcher’s intent behind a query, and not just the literal meaning of the words in the query. This would help Google to provide more relevant results for complex, natural language queries (such as “what are the best action movies of 2022?”)
RankBrain is one of Google’s top three ranking signals, according to Google engineer Andrey Lipattsev. The other two are content and links. However, Google has not confirmed this.
When asked if RankBrain was Google’s most important ranking signal, Google’s Search Quality works or what data it uses, beyond saying it is “self-learning” and gets smarter over time.
On May 16, 2016 Google announced that RankBrain is now their third most important ranking signal.
Google Panda
Google Panda is a change to Google’s search algorithm that was first implemented in February 2011.
The algorithm change was designed to penalise websites that Google considered to be “low-quality,” meaning sites with little original content, excessive advertising, or other characteristics that Google deemed to have low quality seo.
The Google Panda algorithm update has had a profound impact on seo, and has resulted in many website owners scrambling to try and recover from a drop in organic traffic. While some have been successful, others have not been so lucky. If you think your website may have been affected by Google Panda, there are a few things you can do to try and mitigate the damage.