Google is the largest search engine in the world, and it’s constantly updating to guarantee that consumers are served with the most relevant and high-quality search results. These updates can have a significant impact on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The impacts might be favorable, boosting your website’s ranking, or terrible, lowering your website’s ranking. In this blog post, we’ll look at the most important Google algorithm updates and how they impact SEO.
What is Google Algorithm?
The Google algorithm is a system that ranks and displays search results based on relevancy, quality, and user experience. The Google algorithm observes various factors like keywords, content quality, relevancy, and user activity to present the most relevant and helpful results to searchers.
Why does Google’s Algorithm keep updating?
Google’s Algorithm keeps updating for several reasons:
Improving User Experience
Google Algorithms updates provide users with the best and most relevant results thus providing a better experience to users.
Better Crawling and Indexing
Google keeps updating algorithms for better crawling and indexing by making Googlebot more accurate and effective at discovering and indexing web content.
Reducing Spam
Google’s Algorithm updates promote the reduction of spam, hence boosting the quality of search results. It also detects and penalizes websites that use black hat SEO.
Google Algorithm Updates
Some of the major Google Algorithms Updates are:
Panda Update
The Panda update was released in 2011 to eliminate the black hat SEO techniques. It uses machine learning algorithms and considers numerous factors such as content relevance, user engagement, and overall quality of content to evaluate the quality of a website. Websites impacted by the Panda update experienced a large decline in traffic and rankings. It penalizes websites with low-quality or thin content, hence improving the quality of search results and vice versa.
These impacted websites must enhance the quality of their content and get rid of thin and duplicate content to increase traffic and rankings. They must optimize on-page SEO by minimizing keyword stuffing and must improve technical SEO for improved crawling and indexing.
Google updated its search algorithm in 2016. They integrated their core ranking system with the Panda algorithm. This meant that Panda’s guidelines for what is considered a quality website were included in the main algorithm as opposed to updating separately.
Penguin Update
The Penguin update was released in 2012. The main objective of Penguin updates is to penalize websites that have low-quality and spammy backlinks and have excessively optimized anchor text by dropping their ranks. Backlinks are the links from other websites that lead to your website when clicked. Anchor text is the clickable text that is often underlined and has a different color than other surrounding text. These both are important factors in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Website owners should work on creating high-quality, genuine backlinks to avoid penalties by the Penguin update. It is also important to strike a balance between using diverse anchor text and avoiding over-optimization to maintain a healthy and effective backlink profile.
Penguin 4.0, launched on September 23, 2016, was the most recent update to the Google Penguin algorithm that made it less harsh on websites that had spammy links. Instead of penalizing the entire website, Penguin 4.0 just reduced the value of these links, allowing websites to remain visible in search results. This made it easier for websites to recover from a penalty if the problematic links were removed or rejected.
Hummingbird Update
The Hummingbird update was released in 2013. Its main goal was to enhance the search engine’s ability to understand the meaning behind search queries and present more accurate and relevant search results. Previously, with the Hummingbird update, Google’s search algorithm relied heavily on matching the exact keywords in a search query to the keywords on web pages to determine the relevancy of those pages to the query. This approach, however, had drawbacks, particularly when it came to understanding complicated or conversational search queries. Google intended to solve these restrictions with the Hummingbird update by improving its ability to understand the meaning behind search queries.
Unlike Google Panda and Penguin updates, the Hummingbird updates did not penalize the websites. However, it had an impact on search rankings, especially for websites that relied heavily on keyword stuffing or other strategies that were not focused on providing high-quality, relevant content to users.
To optimize web pages for the Hummingbird update, provide content that gives detailed and informative answers to users’ questions. Focus on presenting useful info while using natural language.
Mobilegeddon Update
Mobilegeddon, also known as the Mobile-Friendly update was first introduced in 2015. This Mobile-Friendly update was designed to enhance the mobile search experience. Google understands the importance of mobile-friendly websites as the usage of mobile phones and tablets grows. This update prioritized mobile-friendly and responsive websites in search engine rankings and penalized non-optimized websites by limiting their visibility to mobile users.
Mobile-friendly websites are websites with responsive designs, readable content, fast loading speeds, easy navigation, mobile-friendly media, and accessible to disable people with proper labeling and alt text. By including these features in website design and development, website owners and developers may build mobile-friendly websites that offer a better user experience, increase their exposure, and rank higher in mobile search results.
RankBrain Update
The RankBrain update was first introduced in 2015. RankBrain update serves to improve Google’s understanding of the intent behind user search queries and deliver more relevant search results by using machine learning. RankBrain uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and understand search queries in a way that is more human-like manner.
RankBrain helps Google in understanding the meaning of words and phrases in search queries, even if they are misspelled or grammatically incorrect. Also, it benefits Google in finding synonyms and related ideas that might be relevant to the user’s search.
To optimize webpages for the RankBrain update, prioritize creating content that gives thorough answers to consumers’ queries. Also, focus on providing valuable information and using natural languages.
Conclusion
Google algorithm updates can have a significant impact on search engine optimization (SEO), which can be favorable or adverse depending on how well a website follows the guidelines. To avoid being penalized by these updates, focus on developing high-quality, relevant, and valuable content, building high-quality and diverse backlinks, and delivering a good user experience. Website owners should always keep an eye on these updates and adjust accordingly to maintain or increase their website’s rating in search results.