How Search Engine algorithms Affects Your Rankings

Search Engine Algorithms Updates: History & Evolution

A piece of software used by search engines to analyze content and determine where it displays in the search. Google employs search engine algorithms to decide the organic results rank for a particular search query.

SEO algorithms are like Icebergs.

There are more than 500 search engine algorithm updates annually on an average. But, Very few are announced by Google, others are vague.

Search engine algorithms provide more than 200 ranking factors and serve the following objectives:

• quality and theme
• resolve location
• type of query

SEO Early Algorithms Updates:

Panda Update (Feb 2011): Game Changer for Content

Panda update was not a one-time change but continued to be updated like a filter. It prevented low-quality sites from ranking highly. Updates rolled out gradually over several months, as opposed to previous daily updates.

Targets of Panda updates:

• Thin websites pages or low-quality sites: It targeted websites with only a few pages with useful content, largely similar materials site pages, pages with content scraped from other sites. 

• Duplicate content: Pages duplicated on site or replicated from other sites. In this case, The site that publishes first receives credit and the site that copies will not get a good rank.

• Excessive ads: It targeted sites with low content and high amount of ads.

• Poor navigation: It targeted websites with unintuitive navigation with not linking to all the content.

Type of content that Panda targeted:

• Auto-generated content: It targeted the content that is spun-out of a machine.

• Squeeze pages: It targeted websites having one main page with all content and user must scroll for more information.

• Doorway pages: It targeted pages that may rank for one thing but takes user elsewhere when clicked. It was usually done in commercial sites or malicious content.

• Meta-refresh: It targeted the landing pages which automatically refresh to another site before one can exit.

Penguin Update (April 2012): Cleaning-up Links

This was also a filter like Panda update which brought changes periodically. It aimed to stop spammy links.

Targets of the Penguin update:

• Manipulative link practices: Unethical or spammy ways to generate links were targeted by this update.

• Link trading: It targeted standard reciprocal linking which involves link trading.

• Bad anchor text: The scenario where links containing exact match anchor text might be considered valid if your site has a domain name that corresponds to the keyword in the anchor text. It targeted building links containing exact keywords to boost rank.

• Paid links: It targeted links surrounded by ads or certain promotional words such as Sponsered, Contact! etc.

• Irrelevant links: Unrelated links may be paid or obtained through manipulation.

•  In past, Webmasters can redirect penalized traffic to new sites, Which is no longer possible after this update.

Google Pigeon Update (Jun 2014)

This update aimed at improving local search. It updated distance and location ranking parameters for map searches. It tied traditional ranking factors into local ranking factors.

Google Mobile Update(April 2015)

On April 21, 2015, Google announced about this update to webmasters and warned them to make their site mobile friendly to get higher rankings. This update looked for a mobile friendly page version when ranking mobile results. It is important to optimize for mobile to guarantee visibility and user experience.

How can you avoid SEO algorithms penalties?

Penalties are mainly are of three types:

• Algorithmic: they are due to the algorithm updates.

• Manual: they are imposed by web spam team and reconsideration request has to be filled in this case.

• The combination of both the above categories.

To overcome penalties:

• Analyze your site on regular basis to determine if a penalty has been applied( any drastic changes in traffic)

• View ranking history to compare keyword standing to page traffic.

• check the official blog of Google (in case Google announces any update which is rare) 

• Check social media if other sites owners are also experiencing the same.

•  Verify the health of your backlink profile and state of your content to be on the safer side for any new updates.

Tools to identify updates:

One of the tools to identify the occurrence of updates is Moz(mozcast.com) which provides turbulence means high ranking fluctuations represented by temperature changes.

It is designed to help you keep track of the day-to0day changes in the Google algorithm. High temperature denotes more changes in Google rankings and cooler being the fewer changes. 

For example Weather for Tuesday, August 1 is 98°. 

Mozcast is a weather report showing turbulence in the Google algorithms over the previous day. the hotter and stormier the weather, the more Google rankings changed.

To learn more about the Moz, visit their official website.

Best practices to improve rankings:

These common but basic things must be kept in mind to avoid over optimization and any penalties:

• High-quality content: Good content helps to 

• Backlink profile: Outside links increase authority, thus ranking is increased.

• The site must be visible to the user as well as to search engine.

• User first approach: The main mantra of the webmasters is to view their sites from a user's perspective to be sure that the content is useful, relevant and valuable. Poor user experience tends the crawlers not to index or to find problems while indexing or analyzing the website.  

• Clear hierarchy: The site must be organized properly in a hierarchical order enabling the user to navigate easily through the site.