What are Google algorithm updates?
Do you know that Google answers a whopping 3.5 billion searches every blooming’ day! And the company alphabet, are constantly improving their algorithm.
Right, let’s start by getting our heads around what this Google algorithm is all about.
A Deep Dive into the Google Algorithm
Google’s algorithm, handles a staggering 85-95% of internet searches, and its a digital marketing agency’s job, get your business on the first page, to help you obtain more sales. It ensures your website pops up when folks are looking for information or goods, so whether you sell kitchen appliances or your divorce solicitor, marketing agencies like us, can help get you onto the first page.
How does it do that? It looks at:
Relevance: Say, you’re looking for the best Italian restaurants in Bristol. Google will sift through the the web to fetch you the most accurate answers. It will bring you results, often which are PPC results, organic seo results as well as Google my business results. So, digital marketing agencies like ours, believe that Google uses over 200 different ranking factors, to calculate where a business should rank in the organic results. Google is thought to use separate algorithms, for the PPC algorithm and for the Google my business algorithm.
Usefulness: Apart from being relevant, the search results should be genuinely useful to the shopper, so for example, somebody might be looking for a Italian restaurant which specialises in local craft beer and is woodfired pizza, therefore the websites which Google suggests as the Italian restaurant to visit, should therefore offer craft beer and woodfired pizzas if it’s to be useful to the shopper.
Usability: This takes into account the overall user experience on the page – think loading times, page structure, navigation, you name it. Google also measures usability, for example if the bounce rate is super high, let’s say that your Italian restaurant has bounce rate on the home page, of 99.7%, well it’s pretty obvious to Google that your business is not useful to the shopper, and that could be because of issues such as the website not being easy-to-use.
Quality: The algorithm Google employs the EEAT (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trust) criteria to assess the quality of content marketing.
So, if you fancy your page ranking well in Google, in the organic results make sure that you use white hat methods.
Google Algorithm Updates Unveiled
Each update which Google makes improves its algorithm. The 2018 Google Medic update, was a large update for instance, targeted YMYL (‘Your Money or Your Life’) businesses, ensuring they had reliable, well-sourced content marketing to avoid misinformation. Google always favours businesses that are truly useful, authoritative, and reliable, so users find the right info and trust the results.
Ever heard of the phrase, “change is the only constant”? Well, Google certainly believes in that! It’s constantly improving its algorithm, as any good seo consultant will tell you, the company is making changes to its algorithm every single week. Thankfully, it’s the two to four core updates a year that you need to keep tabs on, as they might significantly affect your website rankings.
Some of the more major Google Algorithm Updates
Let’s take a trip down memory lane and see how Google’s updates have evolved over time.
Penguin Update: This followed the Panda update, disrupting spam links and targeting manipulative link-building. For example, some companies bought thousands of low-quality links, and they incorrectly thought that this was a quick way of getting onto the first page of Google, however it had the complete opposite effect because of the Penguin update, the Penguin updates meant that any businesses with a lot of low quality links incurred an algorithmic or a manual penalty. This often meant that the businesses that were hit by the Penguin update, was sometimes completely removed from Google.
Google Panda Update: Launched back in 2011, it was a massive algorithm update, which brought an end to the reign of content farms churning out low-quality content marketing, and uninformative content. So for example, sometimes, some businesses would use what is called spun content marketing, which would essentially be taking one article and changing how it’s worded, so it makes 1000 articles, this is a sure fire way of incurring a Google penalty. For example, if your business was impacted by a Google Panda update, then this means that your business could be removed from Google organic results.
Hummingbird Update:
Launched in 2013, Hummingbird made searches faster and much more precise by understanding the intent behind a search.
Mobilegeddon Update: This 2015 update categorised pages as either mobile-friendly or not, if your business didn’t have a mobile version of the website designed, then after this update, it was unlikely to appear in the first page results. This update seen many businesses, scrabbling to contact web developers to get them to design a mobile version of their company website.
RankBrain: Also released in 2015, RankBrain, this is when Google started to use artificial intelligence or AI for short to improve its results. Introduced machine learning to better understand search intent and used searcher location to comprehend the search’s meaning.
So how do you bounce back from Google Algorithm Updates
Here’s a golden nugget of wisdom – don’t lose your bottle if your ranking takes a hit post-update. Also, don’t put your businesses seo into a nosedive so, what we mean by that is, sometimes after an update, many businesses start to make knee-jerk changes, to try and quickly recover from the algorithm update. However, what better is to hold your nerve and to slowly incrementally make changes, and to monitor the seo results. If you go make too many changes to quick, could put your seo rankings in the complete nosedive because you making too many changes to your seo to quickly.
Overcoming Post-Update Blues
If the algorithm update leaves a lasting dent in your website’s ranking, it’s time to review your site’s organic SEO and ensure you’re following the white hat best practices.
Search intent: Make sure your content marketing aligns with what your audience is searching for.
Keywords: Sprinkle primary, secondary, and tertiary keywords naturally throughout your content marketing but only use white hat methods.
Title tags and meta descriptions: Craft compelling title tags and succinct meta descriptions that give an accurate snapshot of the page.
Site speed:
A slow-loading site can lead to an increased bounce rate. So do Compress images, switch your site theme, or use lazy loading to improve speed.