Wednesday 13 November 2013

Google's latest updates and how to respond to them

Changes to Google’s Search Algorithms

Google changes its search behaviour up to 600 times every year, mostly small refinements to the way that it processes queries and ranks web sites. However, there have been several major updates that have made a significant difference to the performance of web sites, up to 3~4% of searches in some cases. Therefore, it is worthwhile understanding what Google is up to, and what its (stated and unstated) objectives appear to be. Lets have a look at the recent major Google updates:

Panda

Google’s Panda update programme first rolled out in early 2011. The purpose was to remove web sites from the listings that have poor quality or duplicated content. The last significant change was on 18 July 2013, which implies that Google is continually refining these algorithms to drive spam levels even lower. ‘Spam’ means content that is not genuine, created by people who are trying to ‘beat the system’. Google reported changes that impact on sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. For instance, Wikipedia reports that a content farm (or content mill) employs large numbers of writers to generate large amounts of written content. These articles from content farms may contain identical passages. Therefore, it is important to check your web diagnostics and avoid accusations of duplicated content. We have noticed that duplicated pages can be reported if the web addresses are not set up properly, so-called ‘canonisation’ problems.

Penguin 2.1

While Panda examines content, Penguin looks at links. Penguin version 1 was released in April 2012, and the latest incarnation, Penguin 2.1 was effective from 4 October 2013. Google uses inbound links to measure how popular your site is. Hence, if there are good links from authorative sites such as Government, national institutions or other high-rated sites then Google will perceive your content to be valuable. As you can imagine, many people tried to bypass the system by generating lots of backlinks on the cheap, using ‘link farms’ and other means. Penguin will penalise sites with poor-quality or unnatural links. Some experts recommend monitoring your organic traffic in Google Analytics over a period after an update looking for a dip. A dip in traffic occurring on this date may indicate that your site has been hit by one of Google’s changes.

You should analyse your back-link profile carefully. Make sure that you do not have a large number of sites linking with an exact match for your key target phrase, and don’t have one site generating lots of links to your site. You may have been targeted by negative SEO, where a competitor has created bad links to your site, which makes validating your links doubly important. You can contact the source to remove poor links, or you can use the ‘disavow link’ tool in Webmaster Tools. If a whole linking domain is poor, then you can disavow the entire domain. Even so, you could actually have an increase in traffic, if a competitor who had been ranking higher got hit by Penguin 2.1.

Hummingbird

Google announced this update in late September 2013, but stated that it had already rolled out a month before. Hummingbird is apparently the biggest change to Google’s search algorithm in twelve years. As such, it incorporates Panda and Penguin as described above. Although it’s a massive change, it does not appear to have such an immediate effect on some web sites like Panda and Penguin did. It will however have a long-term impact on web-based searches.

Hummingbird is paying attention to the meaning and context of each search. Rather than just relying on a list of keywords, Hummingbird is trying to respond to the whole query, rather as we would person-to-person. The implication is for better interpretation of longer questions, which may include more obscure key phrases. These are known as ‘long-tail’ key phrases, as statistically they don’t get searched for so often, but they can bring a lot of traffic. Webpronews says “The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words”

What is Google up to?

Google’s ongoing strategy is to rely less on keywords. This implies a sea-change in the techniques needed for SEO, which is going to rely more on quality and content and less on processes to promote keywords. At the moment, Google’s SEO guideines have not changed, but we could expect new tools and processes in the future. Google’s declared focus is on returning high-quality, relevant content in response to searches, and an enhanced user experience. Webpronews says that it’s clear that keywords are becoming less and less important to search engine ranking success as Google gets smarter at figuring out what things mean, both on the query side of things and on the webpage side of things. Google is restricting data about key phrases in it’s analytics tool as well. Hence it is more difficult to work out which keywords are working best for you. Another point is that Google is delivering content on it’s own pages. For instance, if you search for a celebrity or pop star, you’ll get a potted biography on the Google page. In this way, Google keeps your attention on their pages, and therefore not on yours.

A strategy to handle Google’s updates

Concentrate on high-quality, high-depth content which will have lots of related ‘long-tail’ phrases.
Don’t base your strategy on a limited set of key phrases; this will progressively become less competitive.
Keep your XML site map up to date. Make sure that Google (and other search engines) can find your content.
Also, have a clear site structure with a strong home page, with static links to your valuable pages. Ideally these should be within 2 clicks of your home page.
Promote your content so that valuable and relevant web sites link back to yours. Audit your backlinks, and remove or ‘disavow’ any poor or negative links.
Promote your site on social media, such as Google+ (which pays dividends with Google), Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This generates good backlinks and also gives an alternative platform for searches and user interaction. Also consider visual media on Youtube, Pinterest and Instangram.

For more about this check out PDC Internet Solutions.