It’s not a hit news anymore, Google announced that they’ve made a major search engine algorithm update on 24th Feb 2011, we call it as “Google Panda Update“, it affected 11.8% of overall search result. This updates is only affecting US Google only, but soon they will roll it out to the rest in coming days, I believe that it would be pretty soon. Between, it’s important as well even Google just made the change in US because most of the internet marketers tend to rank well in Google US search engine because it has the most users and searches.
What Google wants is pretty simple, a website or blog with quality content which could help people to resolve problems and answer questions.
“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on“, said Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts from Google.
This is not the first time Google change the algorithm, each time Google update the algorithm and it will affect the ranking for many websites especially small and medium size websites, if you have a website or blog which has poor content and purposely made for Adsense, you’ll be the next victim.
A couple weeks ago, Google announced that they’ve done some improvement which they take user feedback signal into their consideration while ranking a website. For example, if many people block your website from their search result, then your website ranking might drop. Anyway, the impact is only 2% of overall search result.
“Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before.”, said Amit Singhal from Google.
If you don’t want people to block you from their search result, then you should provide quality and useful content and serve them as good as you can.
7 Solid Ways How To Rank Well In The Latest Google Algorithm
1. Check Analytics to see which page got slapped by Google Panda
Checking Analytics for your website seems to be a routine work that you (most of you all) couldn’t miss everyday, so you should probably know which page drives the most traffic to your blog everyday. After Google Panda updates, you check which page’s traffic is dropping, then you should check what’s going on and fix it accordingly.
2. Adding quality content into your blog
As what Google mentioned in their latest announcement, Google is trying to kick sites with low quality of content, so if you want to rank well in the latest Google algorithm, then you probably need to write original and quality content on your blog. Remember, rewrite article usually doesn’t have quality and Google might be able to find it out easily, so the only thing you can do now is, writing original and quality content.
3. Updating your blog consistently
Google likes a live blog which has consistent update but not a dead blog. Nowadays, technology grows like bullet train, so the information in previous blog post might be outdated. Therefore, Google sees that your information is no longer useful if you don’t update with latest information, then more likely your blog will be kicked out. That being said, you need to update your blog consistently with updated useful information to rank well in the search engine.
4. Do not place too much advertisement
There’s several disadvantages by placing too much of advertisement on your blog, one is distraction for your readers while surfing your blog, second is Google doesn’t like it because they might think that you build this blog for money and not purposely made for readers. You can place advertisement but try to reduce it, perhaps 10% advertisement in overall would be good.
5. Stay away from keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing or overuse a keyword without naturally in a blog post would kill your ranking. Google stated that if you repeat a keyword excessively in a page, that would harm your site’s ranking. If you want to play safe and fight in the search engine war, you can optimize the keyword slightly more and naturally in a page, says 2-3% keyword density would be safe.
6. Use easy navigation and friendly user blog theme
A blog theme or template will affect the search engine ranking as well, Google likes a clean and neat site which is easy to navigate. This has been discussed by many webmasters out there before, it doesn’t affect much but there’s a little % of impaction of overall Google algorithm.
7. Reduce blog loading time
Google announced in April of 2010, they have added site loading speed to its search engine ranking algorithm. However, site speed carries less weight in overall, it affected only 1% of search queries as the result of the updated. Even thought it’s only 1%, but if you want to get higher chance to rank well in the search engine, then you must do everything perfect.
Wrap Up
Google has been changing the algorithm for many times, but one thing I noticed that Google never changed in the Google algorithm is the quality and original content, there’s a high impaction on the content in overall search result. That being said, you don’t have to worry about any Google algorithm changes, as long as you keep adding original and useful content into your blog, then you’re in the safe side.
What have you done for your blog to rank well in the latest Google algorithm?
Image Credit : Wolkenkratzer