Google for many is their best friend and for others their worst nightmare, and in late February of this year Google made another “adjustment” in the way it provides search results. Google called it Panda it was a major change to their algorithm which impacted 1000′s of sites. The update was designed to reduce the rankings for low quality sites – Low Quality sites was explained this way (Google Blog) “Sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”. Once again the magician shows you the trick but not how its done.
For many in the SEO world saw sites that were on the front page disappear overnight many of the so called content farms lost a tremendous amount of traffic. Google is all about content and user experience and so the SEO world was left not knowing how to fix this or really address it. Until this week the magician finally is providing hints to how the trick is done.
The main talking points of the blog post above are this:
“focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals”
“Our site quality algorithms are aimed at helping people find “high-quality” sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content”
Finally and Most IMPORTANTLY they have given us 23 questions to ask yourself about your site, Google scholars will be pouring over the meaning of each one of these for some time we may even see a movie ” The Sergey Code”.
Well there you have it 23 question to live or Die by.
Content is king, it needs to be original, it should be well written, it needs to contain substance. The days of worthless blogs that were jammed with target keywords are over, 150 word articles aren’t going to cut it and just cause a content site lets you publish it probably isn’t going to help you.