Surviving Google’s Updates

[ViperDove]

Google have launched a lot of updates in the past. Below are the few major ones.

Panda Update: Launched in Feb 2011 and aimed at downgrading low quality sites that provided poor user experience.

According to Matt Cutt, this update can affect the entire site or a section rather than just individual pages. This means that few low quality pages can affect the ranking of your entire sites. Possible solutions include removing the low quality content, blocking it from being indexed or rewriting it to a high quality. Matt warned that the rewrite must be of sufficient quality.

But what is a low quality content? It is a content that is general, non-specific, or not unique.

Page Layout Update: This update penalized sites that have a lot of ads above the fold.

Penguin Update: Released on April 24, 2012. It targeted mainly spam backlinks due to black hat SEO.

My thoughts on how we can survive all these & future updates

I believe that the best way to survive this is by focusing more on our readers. Google wants to show quality result for their users and they’ll keep doing everything they can to achieve this. So let’s not spoil business for Google.

Before you think of outranking any of the top 10 webpages, first ask yourself whether you can provide a better or close to better user experience.

I know that Google’s algorithm isn't perfect and some innocent sites get hit too. However, just know that it is being improved every day and one day it'll be able to rank quality contents with 90% accuracy.

 

[Victor Leigh]

Yes, I can go with that. User experience is the main thing. Look at it from the perspective of the visitor. Or, better still, imagine yourself as a visitor. What is there on your site that makes it worth your while to visit. You should be your own worst critic. If you yourself find your own site boring, then don't expect other people to find anything interesting in it.

 

[Prince25]

This update is really keeping bloggers waiting about their next level of blog algorithm and I think Google should on time do something despite ...

 

[hclpd]

I would go as far as to say Google doesn't know what it is doing right now. Now you might ponder why I said this? Because it is indeed the fact. Google is ranking a lot of gibberish higher than quality content. I have seen that. They love websites like Bubblews where you churn out 400-600 character (not words) and they are ranked within hours of publishing while sites like HubPages and Squiddo that are renown for it's quality content have taken a battering from Google lately. With the recent updates, Google is leaning more towards lighter and fresher sites, no matter if it's full of crap. I have stopped caring and worshiping Google now as I get more than 60% of traffic from social media sites like Facebook, Google plus and Twitter and rest comes from my subscribers.

So, there you go, I don't need to survive anything now, do I?

 

[rashidckk]

In my opinion, sticking with the basics of seo or white hat seo techniques is the best way to tackle with these Google updates. Google updates are the real headaches for those who implement black hat techniques blindly.