A Penguin, a Panda, a Pigeon and a Pirate Walk Into a Bar…

Google was once simple and the web was like the Wild West. Whoever drew fastest would ultimately emerge victorious.

But there was an obvious problem with this. Because it meant that anyone could get to the top of Google, without there being any real necessity to create a high-quality website!

You could write the lowest quality content in misspelled broken English and you could cover it in spammy ads. But as long as you had lots of keywords and lots of links, you’d still come up tops in the results.

That meant that people who used Google would end up getting burned because they’d click on low-quality results. And if that carried on, Google would risk losing its customers. If every time you searched Google, you found websites that were trying to steal your credit card information, you would probably eventually stop trusting Google!

It got so bad that people even started using ‘article spinners’. These were tools designed to copy other people’s content, replace all the words with synonyms and then publish it. The result was an unreadable jumbled mess but it was enough to crack the system.

Remember: Google is just like any other website owner. Their ‘customer’ is the advertiser and therefore the visitor. They have no loyalty to the website owners and they are under no obligation to ensure that you keep getting traffic.

So, Google evolved.

Google changed its algorithms to become more sensitive and smarter. Now Google could detect attempts to ‘game the system’ – it could penalize content that was designed to trick Google and that wasn’t offering any quality in return and it could ensure that only the best quality got to the top.

Google’s algorithms rolled out, each with a different name, and each of which would shake up the market in a huge way. For example…

All Google’s Updates and What They Mean for a Good SEO Strategy

Panda

Panda was the first BIG algorithm update to launch and this was designed to penalize all those sites that had plagiarized their content, that had used spam or that had used ‘keyword stuffing’.

Keyword stuffing is when you try to get Google to rank your site for a certain keyword and you go way overboard in inserting the keyword into your text to the point where it becomes unreadable…

“Welcome to this buy hats online website! Looking to buy hats online? Buy hats online here!”

It sounds funny, but people were really doing this!

All those sites that were guilty of so brazenly manipulating Google’s algorithms were punished – sent right down to the bottom of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This actually destroyed some businesses and many people were very angry at Google as a result.

But in Google’s defense, it had always told site owners to ‘write for the user’ and not to ‘write for Google’.

Penguin

Penguin targeted spammy techniques focussed around links. All those sites that had created hundreds of thousands of links on low-quality sites were penalized. Fortunately, Google also presented a ‘links disavow tool’ that site owners could use to disassociate themselves with low-quality links.

Google emphasized the importance of quality links, over quantities of links.

In other words, if you get a link from the BBC, then it will be worth infinitely more than 1,000 links from Ezine Articles. Simply because anyone can get links from Ezine Articles and a link from the BBC is a genuinely impressive testimony.

The best way to think of this now is as a game of ‘degrees of separation’. Certain sites have much more clout than others. A site with a .edu domain, or a .gov will have a lot of authority and trust to begin with. Likewise, sites that come up in Google’s news section also must carry a lot of influence.

If you can get a link from one of those sites, then this could change your fortunes overnight. But failing that, you can try getting a link from a site that has a link from one of those sites.

Failing that? Get a link from a site that has a link from a site that has a link from a site that has lots of authority and trust.
In other words: get as close to the most influential brands in your niche as possible to reap the major rewards.

Pirate

Pirate focussed on stolen content and copyright breaches. About time too!

In 2017, another update called ‘Fred’, reinforced this by penalizing sites that were violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. Affected sites were typically low-quality sites designed purely to bring in ad revenue.

Pigeon

Pigeon is all about local search and it basically makes the location that the search is being carried out even more important.
That’s why one of the best strategies for a new SEO campaign today is to start local. Start by targeting ‘buy hats online Santa Monica’ and only then branch out into other areas and more global searches.

Another update in 2016 called ‘Possum’ doubled down on this with queries performed closer to a business being more likely to bring that business up as a result.

Mobile

The mobile friendliness update was designed to make webmasters create sites that would be optimized for mobile. This meant they should:

• Load quickly
• Use a responsive design that would change shape depending on the size of the screen
• Use touch-friendly navigation elements

Speed optimizations became especially important in fact, and this is something that Google is really pushing for right at the moment: it wants to ensure that users have the best possible experience from start to finish. So, if your site is filled with unnecessary plugins that just slow things down, then you should remove them.

Google actually offers a site speed test and a mobile friendliness test, both of which can be run very easily through the browser. Test both these on your site to ensure that your page meets the new requirements and you can avoid being penalized for not catering to what is now a significantly large portion of the overall audience.

AMP

Another thing to look into if you REALLY want to get into Google’s good-books is AMP. This stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is a new initiative from Google that is designed to encourage creators to create a second, highly mobilized, super-quick version of their site.

This is possible to achieve through a single plugin if you use WordPress and once that is in place, your site will be able to appear at the top of the other search results with an image from your site and an ‘AMP’ logo to encourage more users to click it.

Rank Brain

Rank Brain was introduced in 2015 to help Google better match the ‘intent’ of a query rather than looking for precise keyword matches. It is not so much an algorithm change as it is a specific tool that Google uses and that relies on machine learning in order to properly understand the content of websites and the precise meaning of search terms.

Between this and Panda, keywords became far less straightforward. They’re still important yes, but now so too is using synonyms for those keywords, natural language surrounding the keyword, and using the exact keyphrases subtly.
Today, the most common advice is to use keywords with a density of around 1-2% density. That means one or two keywords for every 1-200 words. I personally recommend going even less.

Meanwhile, the use of synonyms and related language is what’s known as ‘latent semantic indexing’.

It’s also important to think about the placement of your keywords. A keyword used in the first few sentences, in the header, in the footer etc. all carry more weight than a typical keyword used anywhere else in the copy.

Rank Brain is constantly evolving, using huge amounts of data to better understand what users respond well to. And that doesn’t just mean keyword use, it also means that you need to offer deeper, more meaningful content. The recommendation among many creators is to aim for content that is anything from 800 to 2,000 words long. This should include links out to other useful sites to act as references (I highly recommend linking out to research and studies if you are writing a scientific piece) and it should include images and charts, and bullet points.

Rank Brain also brings even tighter focus onto UX (user experience). Using its machine-learning chops, Rank Brain can look around your site as though it were a real person and it can decide what makes for a good experience and what makes for a bad one.

So even if you have great content, Rank Brain will penalize you if your site is poorly laid out, or if that content doesn’t use a nice readable font with big headers.

The Bottom Line is this – write good, quality content that people want to read!