I have been getting questions from customers about Google’s recent algorithm change and how it will affect their SEO. Last week, they made a drastic change to the way they gather search results, affecting 12% of Google’s results. (CNN’s article on Googles Algorithm Change)
How does this affect you if you are a potential or current customer?
According to everything about this big change, it is to make search results fair and to hurt websites known as “content farms”. The definition of a content farm website according to Macmillan Dictionary is “a website that publishes huge volumes of low-quality content”. (Macmillan Dictionary Definition of Content Farm)
The way I advise SEO is contrary to content farming. We attack SEO with two methods. One being on site keywords that we handle. The second being to blog frequently or occasionaly, depending on what the customer sees fit. The first insures we do nothing to hurt search results. The latter is for getting Google and other search engines to notice that it is not a static site and is constantly changing, increasing the crawls to your site. We have other ideas on SEO, like generating more links to your site, that take extra time and effort to do effectively.
So for you, the customer, this change should not affect you. According to Google’s purpose, it should actually help you. This is because your site will have rich content and not be flagged as a content farm in any way. When it comes to SEO, it is a game, but the search engines always make changes to make it a fair game. Our advice is to do what Google tells you to do and play fair. Google has all the control and realizing this is an important step to doing SEO in an effecient manner.
