Google has made a major change to their search engine algorithm in an attempt to surface quality content and reduce rankings for low-quality sites. Currently the change has only rolled in the US, but Google expect to roll out the changes to the rest of the world in the near future.
The main aim of the search algorithm change is to reduce rankings for sites “which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”. At the same time they want to promote sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis etc. The changes will be noticeable in around 12% of all Google search queries.
This is not the first time Google has made dramatic changes to their search algorithm. In the past Comparison Shopping Sites dominated Google search results for products until the day a Google change which drastically lowered their search position overnight.
This change shouldn’t affect sites which add genuinely unique and useful content. It will affect sites who either republish content from other sites, or who produce large amounts of content churned out specifically to rank highly in search results and not for the purpose of being useful or valuable to readers. Often writers are employed to churn out thousands of articles designed to attract clicks to the ads that appear alongside their content.
The best solution to this (and in fact any) Google change is to produce content which genuinely benefits readers of your site. The days of producing content stuffed with keywords, purely for SEO purposes, appear to be numbered. It’s time to stop writing content for SEO and to start producing genuinely useful original content for visitors to your site. If readers find your content useful then the chances are that Google will do likewise.
23 Responses
I was reading this on Alexa’s blog. I don’t think it effects me because my SEO is really bad anyway, it can’t any worst for me.
It’s to stop content farms. Anyone producing decent, original content doesn’t need to worry about this.
This maybe of interest to someone? https://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-Why-Websites-Rank-High/
I bought this piece of software a little while ago:
https://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/order/offer-buy-now-e.htm
Bit pricey but gives you a lot of info on how to fix your specific site, what you should change etc etc.
If anyone wants me to run a report on their site, i’ll gladly run it for free.
All I would need is your domain name and the keyword or phrase that you want to optimise for.
The report it generates is quite a few pages long but very easy to understand. It also compares your site against your top ten competitors (it pulls these from Google based on the keyword your working with).
*jumps off a bridge*
meta tags don’t carry as much weight as they used to, needed but many a number one site has poor meta data.
Content is key, backlinks are key, domain age is key.
You should also get them to look at using the canonical name for your pages etc, this stops Google “thinking” your content is duplicate when it isn’t.
Do some research into long tail keywords, these provide the highest conversion rates (visitors into buyers).
I’m selling Tarot Cards and Crystals, things like that. I’ve been coping my discriptions from eBay, but I’ll be changing to more original disciptions shortly. I want to see what EKM powershop come up with first to see how they suggest things. One thing I have noticed is that most websites selling my sort of stuff who are top of Googles searches haven’t got detailed or long discriptions, so once I see what EKM suggest I’ll use the top searches discriptions as a yard stick without copying them, and hopefully improve on what their doing.
I’ve been changing my blog posts to my website and also adding loads of posts to facebook as well.
I’m a bit confussed at the moment about H Tags, they said they’ll teach me when the SEO reports finished. I’m not sure if they look like header tags or not or if they are the same thing or not.
My websites a bit like when I firsted opened my eBay shop, as I’m starting from the very bottom and learning all the time.
I still think the thing all of us have to contend with the most is the negative press around the cutbacks.
Reply to 4.1.2.1.1, EKM alternatically generate meta data with each listing, but I don’t like the keywords they have used as its just picked words at random which wouldn’t be used in searches. They tell their website owners to change or adapt their auto generated data.
Its just a learning curve hopefully, otherwise I’m stuck with eBay.
I like the idea of an algorithm which promotes original content.
But is there a way that the al gore rythm method can tell what is original content and what is copied?
Does anyone know about in links? Why would you put an in link with your product discription? I can understand using links to link your terms and conditions from one page to another, or are in link related products that appear at the bottom of a discription?
In the case of Wiki, lots of content is used on other sites. If a site is popular (say Auctionbytes), some sites pick up and distribute their content. Will their rankings be affected even if the content ‘was’ original?