The Ultimate Google Algorithm Cheat Sheet

Have you ever wondered why Google keeps pumping out algorithm updates?

Do you understand what Google algorithm changes are all about?

No SEO or content marketer can accurately predict what any future update will look like. Even some Google employees don’t understand everything that’s happening with the web’s most dominant search engine.

All of this confusion presents a problem for savvy site owners: Since there are about 200 Google ranking factors, which ones should you focus your attention on after each major Google algorithm update?

Google has issued four major algorithm updates, named (in chronological order) Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, and Pigeon. In between these major updates, Google engineers also made some algorithm tweaks that weren’t that heavily publicized, but still, may have had an impact on your website’s rankings in the search results.

Google Algorithm Changes Overview

Before you can fully understand the impact of each individual search algorithm update, you need to have a working knowledge of what a search engine algorithm is all about.

The word “algorithm” refers to the logic-based, step-by-step procedure for solving a particular problem. In the case of a search engine, the problem is “how to find the most relevant webpages for this particular set of keywords (or search terms).” The algorithm is how Google finds, ranks and returns the relevant results.

Google is the #1 search engine on the web and it got there because of its focus on delivering the best results for each search. As Ben Gomes, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering, said, “our goal is to get you the exact answer you’re searching for faster.”

From the beginning, in a bid to improve on its ability to return those right answers quickly, Google began updating its search algorithm, which in turn changed – sometimes drastically – the way it delivered relevant results to search users.

As a result of these changes in the algorithm, many sites were penalized with lower rankings, while other sites experienced a surge in organic traffic and improved rankings thus search results.

[Click to continue reading...]