Google always strive to find ways in innovating and optimizing their services to enhance provide best search results and overall user experience. As the digital world is more dynamic and influential than ever before, you have to keep eye on latest Google updates to achieve higher rankings. Since these updates are important for web masters and SEO, it is always good to be proactive in terms of SEO rankings.
Since its debut, Google’s search ranking algorithm has undergone number of changes. It gives signals to websites the way it governs to rank for queries in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Let us have a look at latest Google SEO updates that channelize ranking mechanism of search engines.
Google panda update
What is Google Panda Update about?
- The code name "Panda" arrived from Google engineer Navneet Panda, who has structured the technology for Google to prepare and implement algorithm.There were totally 28 Panda updates launched by Google and Panda 4.2 was the last one which rolled out on July 18, 2015. This new update is all about reinforcing SEO companies about the value of creating unique, relevant, and remarkable content. Panda update is a filter which emphasize on entire Google index, in order to lesser the visibility of low quality websites. It penalizes those websites who have low quality or duplicate content.
Impact of panda update
- Duplicate content websites or websites with copied content will suffer a major drop in their keyword rankings.
- Websites those who linked on a penalized website will also suffer a fall in rankings.
- Panda update elevated websites to make perfect that everyone tried to make their website fresh and informative.
- Upgrading of websites which contains high quality content, like reports, analytics and presentations.
- Google Panda update made it mandatory for the webmasters to regularly update website with unique content, if want to rank higher in the index.
- Role of “Negative SEO” which means abuse of linking technology has been considerably reduced. For example, usage of excessive links through keyword prevailed as a common practice before this update. Google has realized and sought to address these issues through some tweaks in its algorithm.
What you can do?
- Create unique and great content that people want
- Check whether your website have duplicates or thin content.Whether the content can be expanded, updated and developed to be unique.
- Improve bounce rate and user experience
- Concentrate on high quality backlinks, particularly if you have low quality ones.
- Conduct qualitative research to find out which kind of websites they considered to be low quality and reasons for it.
- If keywords appear too often in an entry, this will be considered as inferior content. Ensure your website doesn’t have like this.
Google Penguin
What is Google Penguin update about?
- Google rolled out update in the year of 2012, to penalize thosespammy links and drop the websites rankings which werebuiltwith low quality links in their webpages. Google Penguin update is about cleaning up of unnatural and black hat link building tactics. Prior to Penguin update, negative SEO users often use tools to spam backlinks for low-quality online properties. They used to place those links in "spun" articles in where it is rewritten by software to appear like unique content.
- Google's algorithm will detect these spammed backlinks and define that website should have authority level because other websites are pointing to it. Accordingly, the backlink spam will boost rank.
Impact of Penguin update
- Websites will experience the same impact irrespective of their location
- Too many links can penalize a website, especially if they are from poor quality sites.
- Over-optimization can be as much harmful as no optimization.
- In simple, this algorithm is focused on specific pages toxic links are pointing to, insteadof whole website.
- If you have builtspammy or manipulative links, you will face a penalty for this almost immediately.
- A significant development with Penguin update is now it isURL-based, while previous updates targeted domains as single units.
What you can do?
- Add byline to blog posts.Thiswill help Google to understand how relevant the post is to users.
- The content quality is crucial to your website ranking. If the websiteuses scrapped content or content from other websites, then it is more likely to be hit by this Google Penguin update.
- Start using blogs and provide your visitors with great content to use and share
- Ensure website’s entire link building efforts are wandered around highquality backlinks.
- Securing website with SSL certificate will increases the chances ofgetting website ranking increased.
- If there is very less text on a particular page for a legitimate reason, better exempt the page from indexing.
- By using "HTML Suggestions" in Google Webmaster Tools will make sure that Google is not picking up on content duplication.
- Keep authenticity in your SEO efforts and avoid "black hat" SEO techniques which violate Google's quality guidelines.
- Keep eye onbacklinks and ensure that don't have any sites linking to yours which are harmful for your rank.
Google mobile friendly update
What is Google mobile friendly update about?
- Since April 2015, Google officially started to reward the search rank of mobile-friendly websites and penalizeswebsites that were not mobile-friendly.
- Google officially announced on March 2018, that it will be using mobile first indexing. It implies that they will index websites based on the mobile versions not on the desktop versions which has been done in the past. This update happened because of rapid increase in the mobile searches and desktop searches are minimized.
- This update of mobile friendliness is not a big surprise from Google, as it has been trying to ensure that mobile users have great experience for years. This update aimed at providing mobile device users relevant, high quality SERPs which are optimized for their devices.Google define the mobile friendly update as an important change to help users discover more mobile-friendly content.Google will now also consider data from indexed apps in search ranking, providing users of that app a better view into their app content.
- According to Google, the website is not mobile friendly if,
- It doesn’t auto adjusts website content so that users don’t have to rotate their screen or need not to zoom.
- Keeps links atappropriate distance apart so that enablingit easy to click on the correct one.
- Have texts that are able to read without zooming.
Impact of Penguin update
- Google mobile-friendly update makes mobile functionality a key ranking signal
- Mobile-first indexing indicatesabout Google’s attempt at indexing and ranking the website from a mobile point-of-view.
- Google will treat the World Wide Web when bumping into websites that follow the guidelines required by mobile-first indexing.
- You may have very limited visibility in search results if your website is not mobile friendly.
- With this update, if the website isn’t mobile friendly, it may run the risk of not being found in Google searches.
What you can do?
- Just being mobile responsive website isn’t enough here after, you have to make sure that websites are made with Mobile First.
- One of the most crucial things you have to consider is, to do improvement on your SEO efforts by giving mobile as much priority as they do.
- Optimizing website for mobile friendly will definitely set your marketing strategy on fire;hence you should not postpone it.
- Keep in mind that responsive website doesn’t always can be mobile friendly
- Use “Mobile Friendly Test” tool of Google and ensure your website is mobile friendly.
- Start to think of investing in accessibility for your customers.
- You should keep an eye on the Mobile Usability section of Google Webmaster Tools account. Thisgets you a list of pages with errors.
- Google page speed update
What is Google mobile friendly update about?
- Since 2009, page speed has been a ranking factor but on desktop never on mobile. In July 2018, Google announced that page speed will be considered as one of the ranking factors for mobile searches. Here the ranking factor applies same standard to all pages, irrespective of the technology used to build the pages.You probably know of the fact that SLOW desktop or a mobile website is harmful when considering SEO.
- Page speed mentioned can be measured in terms of time lag between “a link click” and “web page visibility”.A website page interacts with browser in order to become visible. Browser receives page information from website’s server. This information is received in the form of multiple bytes. Therefore, page speed is also termed as “first byte time period”. In simple terms, page load time is the time required to complete loading of web page content.
Impact of page speedupdate
- Google speed update will have negative impact on pages which deliver the slowest experience to users.
- Through this update it said that it is looking to target the slowest mobile websites.
- Google stressed on the point that it would only affect the slowest websites and fast loading websites r won’t get a boost.
- While rankings for given web page depends on many factors, in this update Google once again stressed on the importance of quality content.
- Mobile page speed update and the mobile first update are two different things. Hence mobile page speed update will have impact on websites irrespective of whether the website is moved to mobile first index or not.
- Though the speed of a page doesn’t stop it from being indexed in Google Search results, this can cause a significant delay in the time frame of indexing process.
- Although Google speed update doesn’t have significant impact on the search engine indexing, yet it is a good idea to keep up websites with quicker load times.
What you can do?
- You can make the switch to AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Here the AMP means of the project which is an initiative aimed to make the web better for all.
- Leveraging Search Console and page speed insights are the greatest ways to check in on your website’s usability.
- Google PageSpeed tool is one of the most reliable pages loading assessment tool.This new update gives it more depth, letting you to look beyond loading speed, and explore into more data which explains the page loading process.
- When a page has more images from other websites, Flash uploads, and other scripts, that can cause to slow down its load times. By minimizing the number of elements on each page and by reducing the number of scripts, you can quickly improve website speed.
- You can use Lighthouse, an automated tool which is a part of Chrome Developer Tools to audit the quality, performance and accessibility of web pages
- Pay attention to page size and crop your images to the appropriate pixel sizes before uploading them. This will help to lighten the loading of page making it easier for Google in search engine indexing.
- Testing website speed after installing each plugin. Limitthe use of any unnecessary plugins. This can prevent negative effects on your website and speed as well.
In Conclusion
There is no better time than now for making these important updates to your website. Embrace these Google algorithm changes and grasp the opportunity to outrank your competitors.Most of the times, Peoplecan see how rankings fluctuate, drops in traffic. Stillthey don’t know what to do.
As time passes by we can expect more from Google. By being updated with every change Google made so far will improve your marketing and SEO moves.The best thingyou can do is to start reviewing these and start implementing now. This gives you a head start in achieving ranks better than your competitors!
