The year in search according to Google
Here is a quick recap of current event searches in Google. Now, it doesn’t touch any of the big news in marketing or business (other than Google+ or the Apple’s iPhone and iPad). Nor does it mention the large changes Google rolled out in it’s search algorhythm. So let’s see if we can touch on some of it in hopes of making sure you are ready for 2012.
Don’t worry, I will be as brief as possible to stick to main changes you’ll want to make sure you are aware of rather than to cover every little episode.
In January 2011 major sites such as overstock.com and JCPenny began to notice penalties. Not sure if this signaled Google to crack down harder or if it was the initial phase of changes to come all year long. The companies were giving away discounts and other offers to encourage websites to link to them. Links do drive up SERPS (search engine results page) placement but this practice is in violation of Google’s terms of service. Think of what Google is or is offering. A place where you can search and find what you are looking for not one site who wants to offer it all. The leason here is that though there are ways to cheat the system, you won’t always win. It can take months to get back in good standing with Google at a waste of time, money and sales. If you put that same amount of resources into creating better products, customer service and engaging your customers they will naturally want to talk about you online and maybe even link to you as well.
At the end of January Google wanted to stop sites from copy and pasting content (scraping content) just to have more text which is considered content spam. Google will find duplicates of the content and only give one site the credit for it based on their own logic. So it is important to write your own content which only serves you better. Yes, larger companies have paid top writers so you think yours won’t be as good. But you can glean from it what you might want to write. After all, everything you write or say is a regurgitation of what you have read or heard before with YOU added to the equation. Take the time to write about YOUR company and offers. The way you write it will also help explain the differences between companies and THAT is the key to advertising — standing out in the crowd. All mobile phones are about the same coverage, about the same dependability, about the same costs but they don’t argue, “no, WE are the fastest”, they separate themselves and find how and what they want to promote to diferenciate. Only you know your company and how it’s story should be told and sold to the public.
The end of Feburary Google made one of the biggest algorithm changes (Panda) focusing on what would be coined “thin content”. Content pages just to be pages that had little writing. Google stated that the change affected 12% of all sites. This was to deal with low quality sites offering little conent to either bolster ad click through rates or where fly by night sites offering nothing worth while but stealing placement online. As above, real well written content is the answer. Sites that took the time to have great content (not too much or it would be seen as keyword spam) remained unaffected.
At the end of March Google unvieled it’s Google+ button +1 to compete with Facebook’s Like button directly in searach results. This would allow searchers to see if anyone in their Circle had clicked it showing that it might be a good search result based on their liking (sorry to use the Like term, it just works (kudos on that FB)). Google now has many Google+ features for businesses and we’ll discuss them later as they became available.
Mid April through June, three version of the Panda changes were released to include information of sites that were blocked by users via browser tools or in search results. When you do a search and click on a site, see that the site is not right for you and click back to search results you’ll see a new links, “block all pages from this site”. Google sees your click and takes it into consideration for not only your future searches but others as well.
Late June Google finally releases it’s next attempt to compete with other social media sites with the public release of Google+. It grew fast within the Google fan base but those on the fence were very vocal about their disbelief it would be a worthy adversary against existing social media giants. (Yes, I used the term Giants in opposition to Google. That is how the public saw the match up). 10 million people did join within the first two weeks and continues to grow especially within the technical and marketing groups.
July and August saw more Panda releases in other parts of the world.
In Mid August they released expanded sitelinks (the additional links you’ll see below the main link when performing a search. They have been around for a while but here Google expanded them to 12 then back down to 6 where it was just a line of 3-4. You can’t control it but Google picks up on what it determines to be your main links. If your site is products, services, contact us, that is what you’ll see. If your site has dozens of links, it will post the most prominent based on rankings similar to pagerank. Make sure your top pages to market are easily linked to from all pages and your navigation is well optimized.
Mid September they released an update to allow you to use rel=next and rel=prev in your links for pagination. This is where you can jump forward and back in blogs and here Google wanted to know more defined what the conetent relationship was to it would not see them as duplicates in more places on your site. Structure in navigation as above is all you’ll need to address here. Navigation makes it easier for your viewers too.
Additional Panda changes or releases where rolled out but no details where released by Google. Talk is that is was to address large player sites who seemed to not be affected by previous released changes in order to address some of their specific tactics that cheated the search systems.
In the middle of October, Google changed their searched to be encrypted with SSL usage. This made it more difficult for some data companies to pull organic keyword referral data and was thought that only Google would be able to provide statistically or anylitical data about search. The number of affected analytical data companies affected continue to increase.
November was all about freshness. You can have a great site, lots of content and everything perfect but if there have been no changes recently, your site will be hit (35% of sites where). So, keep writing even if you just have one simple product or service. Talk about it, the industry, staff changes, what ever you can to keep it fresh. An easy way to do this is to have a blog too. Engage with your customers or potentials by being a leader in your industry. But you have to get it all online and out there.
In November Google released a list of changes to show it is being more transparent about changes made. They are still a bit vague (they don’t want to release all their secrets). In December Google release another set and stated they will do this each month to sharing all some of the changes released.
No doubt it was a huge year of changes for Google as well as all of us working online. I’m happy with the changes because it keeps us focused on good positive change and keeping fresh and creative. It’s exciting to see what solutions are to come of it all and how sites improve making all of our online experiences better.
How has your site been impacted this year? And what did you do or need to do about it?