In the last month there have been 4 separate minor Google Updates, which are starting to change the landscape in which websites operate. While businesses are still reeling from the Panda update and trying to recover positions these new updates may just send them back to the beginning.
Before we discuss the updates and how they affect your business it’s important to understand that these updates should never have affected your business. If you were practising a WHITE HAT, ethical search engine optimization campaign and focusing on a great user experience then you would not have dropped rankings.
I find it frustrating that so many businesses cry foul when an update is done to improve the quality of search results removing spammers from the results. In my opinion these updates are great and personally I never worry as to whether an update will affect our site or our clients sites.
The reason is I know that we are delivering quality content, quality user experiences and a quality experience for search engines. By doing this we ensure that we are “update proof” and we only continue to rise through the rankings.
Sure we could rise faster if we did these more unethical techniques, we certainly have the skill to do them, but Search Engine Optimisation is a marathon not a sprint. Our goal isn’t to shoot to the top only to fade out. We simply steadily move towards our goal of dominant number one rankings.
So while I will share with you the updates please note that any clients of ours reading this it wont affect you, just those sites practising less than ethical SEO principles.
Update #1: Panda Update 20 (September 27th 2012)
This update was aimed to penalizing exact match domains that had low quality content and low quality user experiences. These sites were penalized and removed from the search engine index.
Update #2: EMD Update 1 (September 28th 2012)
This update built on the first update and further reduced the amount of low quality exact match domain name websites from search engine rankings. The first update did not go far enough and this update was a patch fix to the first update.
Update #3: Penguin Update 3 (October 5th 2012)
This was the third update and refresh of the Penguin data and affected around 1% of searches across all languages. The update was aimed at further cracking down on spam sites which offered little to no visitor value
Update #4: Top Heavy 2 (October 9th 2012)
This update focuses on reducing the number of sites ranking well which have too much advertising at the top of the site. Users complained that they had to scroll too much to see real content as such sites with content pushed down the page are being penalized.
You will probably notice a common thread in these updates, they are all targeting low quality sites. So if you are delivering high quality content and a great user experience you’ve got nothing to worry about.
In my opinion, this is what you should be focusing, at the end of the day a site needs to convert as well as gain search engine rankings!
