SEO is no longer easy and simpler. New SEO trends have entered the market massively and your responsibilities towards your website has increased. So how is it possible to keep up the pace with such increasing trends?
I can with my experience in SEO have discussed 10 most important changes that you ll witness and which you cannot ignore at any cost, obviously if you want higher rankings.
Panda, Scraper and Farmer Updates
Often Google makes changes in its algorithm but most of the people don’t notice these changes. You probably notice the change only when Google rolled out its Panda or Farmer update.
Google guaranteed that these changes would impact 12-15% of search results, at least in United States. The sites that provided high quality content were awarded because of this and those who were link farm content sites got penalized massively.
The best example here is mahalo.com. This website ranked for more than 30K keywords before the update and only 9K keywords after the Panda update i.e. more than 70%. Before the update mahalo.com ranked with Zealand Air, digg, etc in top 10 and after the update they fell out of top 200 results also.
Also, the Scraper update that entered the market a year later, targeted only the scraper sites. Matt Cutts has always tried to eliminate those sites who copy original content from others or have a poor quality articles written in their sites.
This change was brought in the lime light only to show searchers the fresh and original content rather than the scraped and duplicate content.
Caffeine, Google’s new search index
Google offered the largest number of web content than anyone else can think of with the help of Caffeine which is an SEO change. It allowed more than 45% of fresher results for web searches.
Google confirmed that this was not an algorithm change but a revamped version on the way they index. With the image below you might get a clear cut idea.
We can clearly see that the older index was in the form of layers. So the upper layers were indexed very quickly, but the layers at the bottom took significant time in showing the results. With the help of caffeine, Google can now analyze the web in small batches and it is updated on a regular basis. So basically every new page can be easily added directly to the index. Searchers can now find fresher information much faster and easily.
Unexpected changes in SERP
Caffeine really brought significant changes in the search results. It started offering wider range of content to the searchers. Before caffeine was introduced in the lime light, Google used the standard version of showing results, something like this:
After caffeine was introduced, we get to see something like this:
The best part about this version is that you can change your search focus in whatever way you want depending upon your needs. With so many changes it is really becoming difficult to challenge the game played by Google. Your content needs to be highly optimized in order to get better rankings.
Mayday Update
I don’t know how many of you noticed about this change earlier in 2010. It was not at all a ranking change, but an indexing change. With this update we came to know that sites which are getting less or no traffic, they were also getting indexed. E-commerce websites were effected badly because of this change. These sites have loads of item pages that don’t have enough links going to them and are several clicks away from the home page. Also there was no guarantee of quality content on these pages.
It has been checked that these item pages do not get loads of external links and the content for them are generally taken from the database. The Mayday change helping these pages rank better with at least long tail queries.
Merge Between Yahoo and Bing
The merge between the two happened a while ago, but I believe that the SEO is still the same for each one of them. You create original content with targeted keywords and I can guarantee you, both the search engines will love it equally.
Like Google, Bing also puts higher priority on external links though. Always remember that if there is a crawl error in your code errors, it will prevent Bing from indexing your site.
Advice: If you are targeting Bing, then please make sure that your domain name have keywords in it. Good title tags with appropriate keywords are equally important.
It is important to pay attention on these three vital changes that was done by Google in the year 2010-2011. Just because Google has the authority of more than 60% of all the searches, it doesn’t mean we should ignore Bing.
It is vital for you to work your way with these changes to get an idea of where your site is heading to?
With the results, obviously, you can determine your higher priorities.
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