Recent changes to Google rankings – the ‘Quality Update’

At the beginning of May, we at Click began to notice some significant changes to Google's rankings. In the time since, we’ve been working to identify whether Google had released an algorithm update.

A lack of confirmation from Google, and confusing speculation about a ‘Phantom’ or other unnamed update across the search industry meant that we wanted to carry out further research before dedicating a blog to the subject. Now that Google has confirmed that changes have been made, we've come to understand that our initial analysis was correct.

Has Google made an update?

Not as such. Updates usually introduce new features or filters to the way Google ranks websites. However, there has been a noticeable change to the way that Google's core algorithm works in terms of assessing a website’s content.

This is the reason we’ve seen a significant difference in the way certain pages rank in Google. We need to understand what the change is and how to respond.

How does it work?

In short, Google has become less tolerant of information which it thinks is either low quality, manipulative, over-optimised or not directly relevant.

When it finds content that fits these criteria, Google applies a gradual penalty, causing the pages concerned to progressively drop down the rankings until the content issues are addressed. Once the content is improved and is again crawled by Google, the pages concerned will begin to move back up the rankings at a similar rate to their decline.

This process has always been part of the Google algorithm, it’s just that Google has tweaked its criteria and therefore content that it had previously not identified as ‘low quality’ is now being penalised.

The resulting drop in search engine performance is not an official penalty, but merely a downgrading of the performance of particular pages. Therefore some pages on a site will be affected and some pages will not. There’s no current evidence of these changes creating site-wide penalties.

This process has always been part of the Google algorithm, it’s just that Google has tweaked its criteria and therefore content that it had not identified as ‘low quality’ is being penalised

How does it impact your SEO campaign?

Practically speaking, most of the pages impacted were already ranking outside of SERP one, so dropping further has had little difference regarding traffic generation.

The main issue will be whether Google’s latest change will present a barrier to the success of future search marketing campaigns, regarding traffic, revenue and ROI.

What’s our advice at Click?

Our advice regarding the importance of quality content remains the same:

• Create content of substance that focuses on user needs.
• Present content in an attractive way to the user.
• Avoid over-optimisation and keyword stuffing.
• Avoid ‘boiler plated’, duplicated, or automated content.
• Avoid content that adds no or limited value.