It’s no surprise that Google, the most popular search engine in the world, has made some massive changes in the last few months. If you’ve not been paying attention, what has been happening is that many smaller website owners and marketing companies are breaking out in a cold sweat. Google said they are going to secure their searches better for the sake of privacy. They announced that they were getting changes for punishing sites that had too much advertising on the top. They are punishing certain links that are appearing rather than just disavowing them and they are making life infinitely more difficult for those who are using adsense or trying to use their sites to make money.
What did that change mean for people who were getting clicks from Google search? One of the truly disconcerting issues that is happening lately is that most of the data that we looked at to analyze our work and to determine if our campaigns were effective is missing. They gave that back to us with a politely phrased ” not provided” area that gave us no clue what was happening in our world.
That isn’t by any means the only changes that have been made in Google lately with the constantly changing and evolving algorithm being replaced by a new one (Hummingbird) as well as tweaks in Penguin, Panda and rumors of the implementation of other penalties and changes.
With all of the many changes taking place, the unique penalties and the implementation of more requirements for searches and sites, many webmasters and even a few SEOs are beginning to rethink their life and/or their careers.
The reality is that while some of the changes are disconcerting, many of them have been coming for a long time and many are long overdue. There are mistakes of course and there are issues with what’s happening in search, but there have also been some new sites rising to the top offering quality information that was heretofore unseen due to a few other sites stuffing the ballot box with low quality content that really didn’t offer a great deal to the reader.
The trick today is not to quit, but to rethink your model if you’ve been using low ranking or duplicated content that doesn’t offer a good experience to the user.
Get your sites, your sitemasters and your writers into the habit of offering high quality and high profile articles that have a lot to give to the reader. Get your websites into shape and review your linking to ensure that you’re not being hit by low quality links that could lower your ratings in search.
