Google is the dominant search engine in the UK, Europe and most of the developed World. In the UK and Europe Google “owns” more than 95% of the search market. Many businesses have been built on traffic from Google, whether it is Paid or Organic Google accounts for the majority of a site’s search traffic.
With Google’s search traffic being so lucrative webmasters have been employing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques for several years. Some SEOers use “White Hat” techniques that may take longer to establish but have a much longer lasting result. Others use “Black Hat” techniques that have quicker results but tend to last for only a few months, some of these techniques can even get the site banned.
Over the past couple of years Google has been introducing changes to its algorithm to enhance its users’ experience once they click onto a search result. Google has been on a mission to eradicate low quality websites; it has also been working hard on promoting quality websites. As a result Google has been demoting websites that have been over optimised by their webmasters purely to increase keyword ranking.
Here are the 8 significant changes Google has made over the past 2-3 years:
- June 2010 Caffeine Update – sites with old content were demoted and sites with new and fresh content were promoted
- August 2010 Brand Preference – Google declared that it would now give more preference/authority to big brands and brand related searches
- December 2010 Social Signals – Prior to this update Google did not give any value to Social media website links and interactions. This now changed, so Google now factors in social links and interactions when determining the ranking position of a site.
- February 2011 Panda Update – Google declared that it would no longer give any value to link farms, content directories and link directories. Any links from these types of websites have also been devalued. Too many links from these sites and a site will be given a warning to remove them, failing that the site will also be demoted.
- March 2011 Google + Launches – Since it declared that Social Media links and interaction do carry value Google decided it was to launch its own social media platform to compete against the likes of Facebook.
- October 2011 Query Encryption – When users are signed into their Google account all their search activity is now withheld, webmasters are no longer provided with key data such as “keyword traffic” for visits that have come from a user logged into their Google account.
- February 2012 Venice Update – This update was introduced to ensure users of Google were getting the most local website returned. When a user does a search they should now automatically only see results local to them.
- April 2012 Penguin Update – Google unleashed the Penguin update to demote websites and webmasters that have used black hat techniques to artificially enhance a website purely for search engine rankings. This update is tweaked every month and a new iteration has been launched every month since the initial update.
All these changes have penalised websites employing black hat techniques, these websites have been demoted in the search engine ranking positions. Webmasters and SEOers using “White Hat” techniques have not been affected and continue to rank well.
All of these changes have helped Google deliver “Universal Search”, more on this in my next article!
If you are worried about your SEO or the techniques used by your SEO Firm then get in touch and we’ll be able to provide you with a full analysis of where your site stands.
Kaled Miah
