For anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock, you probably know that Google’s released several updates to its algorithm over the past few years. These updates were targeted towards continuously improving user experience and making sure that we, as online marketers, do our jobs without trying to ‘game’ the search engines.
So, you might have heard about the Google algorithm updates, but do you know what they actually did? If not, I’ve listed and explained a few of the more recent and commonly known updates here:
In February 2011 Google released ‘Panda’, which aimed to limit (or rather eliminate) the use of thin and duplicated content, as well as ‘scraper’ sites. This update shocked website owners because it completely challenged the way SEO was understood and performed to date.
Then almost a year later in January 2012, ‘Top Heavy’ was released, targeting pages with excessive ads below the fold. Okay, so not as big a shock as the Panda, but…
A few months later, Google rolled out ‘Penguin’ in April 2012 to regulate the use of over optimized anchor text, link schemes, and aggressive SEO.
Then just when everyone was getting their footing back, Google unleashed the ‘Pirate’ update in August of the same year, which penalized copyright violators.
As if that wasn’t enough, only a month later in September 2012, the ‘EMD’ (Exact Match Domain) update was put out, which targeted keyword rich domains with thin content. The ‘EMD’ update works in such a way that when someone types the name of your domain in the Google search box, your site no longer gets as much ‘link juice’ contributed to its page rank as it used to. For example, bluewidgets.com would typically come up #1 when entering “blue widgets” into the search field, but with Google’s ‘EMD’, having an exact match domain name doesn’t ensure you’ll get the number one search result anymore.
Although there are many more, these are just a few of the changes Google has made in only a couple of years, which reinforces how frequently things are changing in the world of search engines.
As a result of the complexity and frequency of these changes, some business owners have opted to go with the services of an SEO company. Why? Because companies like Melbourne SEO Services devote resources to watching for and managing search engine changes like these, which in turn ensures their clients stay on the right side of Google (that’s the top side!).
Do you think your website’s been affected by one of the Google algorithm updates? If so, chat with one of our helpful team members about how we can help you today. Click here to ask us anything.