Have you noticed a change in Google? When you do your daily search for a company name, or the address of your favorite travel website, do you typically get what you are looking for? I bet you do, and so do I. Google is the greatest search engine of all time, hands down, and they have been the reigning champ for 10 years. If Google is the champ and the same great results we looked at 2, 3 and 5 years ago are still there, why is Google coming out with a new update almost every week? The Graphic below provides a brief description of the 12 Major changes Google has made since January.
searchrankings.net
Why so many changes? Why are the new changes being promoted so aggressively? Out of the 12 Major changes this year, only one of the changes addresses webspam. Our research indicates that webspam includes keyword stuffing, doorway pages, lead generation pages, but can also include poor link building strategies and recently Google announced a penalty for over optimizing a website. “Doth protest too much?”
For Your Consideration… Google Publicity 13.0
- As Google grew, and its competitors shrank, its presence, and influence became larger.
- Google technology also improved, and with it the ability to add more updates.
- All the while the core of Google remained the same, in order to sell more Adwords, The Google organic search needs to be the best.
- Links drive results, they always have, and they continue to drive the best results, despite updates that have been implemented to stop any kind of link building.
- Google has released 12 major updates in 2012 and the year isn’t half over.
- Only 1 of those updates works to prevent webspam sites from high ranking benefits.
- 3 of the 12 updates mention “Search Quality Updates”, here is the link to Google video inside the search quality meeting: Google Video “Inside Quality Search Meeting“.
- All of these updates are meant to pull webmaster and SEO’s in a positive direction, and reduce the negative connotation “Link Spam”, and “Google Penalties”, that typically follow Google updates.
- As webmasters, website owners and SEO’s we are anxious to implement the changes and see the positive effects. Stayed to see the next big update, and the press it gets.
Could it be, that Google has decided that the best way to reduce the number of “bad practices”, is to come out with an overwhelming amount of data and tell website owners to make sure they are following the best practices (all 1,000,000 of them), and pay attention new updates are coming out every day. At Google we want to make sure our search engine is the best search engine, just like last year and the year before…
More Confusion Than Confidence
The calls to our office for SEO Audits, Link Remediation Services and Google Guideline Reviews have gone through the roof (Thank You Google!). However in the last 6 months we have seen very little movement up, down or sideways with any of our clients. Our best practices remain the same, strong websites, great content, timely updates, relevant links and a positive user experience.
Nothing sexy about the work we do just the basics. We could actually do more good work for the World Wide Web, and our clients, if we weren’t so busy telling our clients that the “Google Sky” isn’t falling! Can’t we all just get along?
