How do I succeed when the Google algorithm keeps changing?

Its been a long journey as an SEO expert and there has been a lot of fascinating changes in the SEO sphere. Google has made searches more human and more relevant. Here are a few changes by Google that fascinated me and most of those in the field of Online Marketing. There are a lot of lessons to learn from the changes tat have occurred.

For the the benefit of those who may be not know, lets just start by defining a Google Algorithm.

PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. - Wiki

Google is a large library with a lot of information related to search queries. According to the definition above, PageRank is classified as an algorithm that is used by Google to search for information in its search engine.

Over the years there has been quiet a number of changes in how Google ranks pages when users visit with a search query. I am going to pick on a few algorithms that were so fascinating which left some mark in the SEO industry.

1. Google Mobile Friendly Update

In 2015, a revolution emerged of mobile friendly pages, websites etc. Google released a significant new mobile-friendly standing algorithm that’s designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results. This update had a lot of questions around it such as: If my site is not mobile-friendly, will this impact my desktop rankings as well? and What about sites that redirect to a mobile subdomain? Will they be considered mobile-friendly?

This algorithm came with a huge change, the change was straightforward and massive. Your pages were either mobile-friendly or they weren’t (a yes/no response) and it would impact everyone. The update wasn’t really about organic search. It was about responding to user behavior, which was trending in the direction of mobile. Remember this is in 2015.

Enough about that.. lets move to the next one.

2. Google Hummingbird

The Hummingbird is my favorite change that occurred in the past 10 years.

In 2013, Google announced the coming of the Hummingbird. The name was derived from Rapid and Defined. Before the Hummingbird,search was like giving you back exactly what you have put in. For example if you search for "soccer", the results were all about the word soccer. One year before Hummingbird, search results gave you exactly what you put in – be it a single word (“games”), a long-tail string (“who is the mayor of Burlingame, CA?”), or even a well-known abbreviation (“NBA”). (SEJ)

The Hummingbird was designed to better focus on the meaning behind the words, paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or discussion or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. This led to a lot of websites losing rankings as most pages were optimised for words. Hummingbird was looking at pages that matched the meaning of the query rather than pages that had words that matched the query.

3. BERT - which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers – was carried out to help Google better understand natural language processing. BERT is said to be among the biggest Google updates of the year (2019) – affecting roughly 10% of all search queries. This update didnt require changing anything on your website but only required the SEO specialists to keep creating high-quality content and keep the user in mind.

There are other core updates such as Penguin, Panda and Pirate that came before the major BERT in 2019. Penguin was launched in 2014 and it brought users relevant and exact local search results that were tied more closely to conventional web search ranking signals. Google stated that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters. Panda - this was a search filter introduced in February 2011 and meant to stop sites with underprivileged quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. This affected a lot of sites and pages as well. Pirate - this is another filter introduced in August 2012 designed to prevent sites with many copyright infringement reports, as filed through Google’s DMCA system, from ranking well in Google’s listings. The filter is sporadically updated. When this happens, sites previously impacted may escape, if they’ve made the right improvements. The filter may also catch new sites that escaped being caught before, plus it may release “false positives” that were caught.

List of Google Updates:

1. Google Panda Update - 2011
2. Google Penguin Update - 2012
3. Google Hummingbird Update - 2013
4. Google Mobile Update - 2015
5. Google Quality Update - 2015
6. Google RankBrain Update - 2015
7. Google AdWords SERP Update - 2016
8. Interstitial Penalty - 2017
9. Google "Fred" - 2017
10. "Medic" Core Update - 2018
11.  Site Diversity June - 2019
12. September Core - 2019
13.  BERT - October - 2019
14. January Core - 2020
15. May 2020 Update

For one to succeed when these algorithms keep on changing, one has to embrace the changes. As an SEO specialist, Digital marketer or Influencer you have to understand that Google is changing everyday to ensure it satisfies the user not to please your page or website. As long as your content is not relevant to search, it will not rank better.

When developing your site, develop a site that is easy to navigate, responsive and optimized properly for search. Think less about the search engine and more about your end-user. What are you solving? Use a variety of types of content, including images, videos, infographics, and text. Monitor your site so that you can identify any changes in traffic rates and correct any drops as quickly as possible.

To keep a high SERP rank and presence no matter how the algorithm changes, create high-quality, user-friendly content.

Credit: SEJ, BrightEdge